'Manchester deserves better mental health services' campaign is calling for a mass lobby outside Chorlton House on this date, from 9.30am - the meeting starts at 10.00am. Chorlton House, 70 Manchester Road, Chorlton, M21 9UN.
D-day for Service Users: Please support demo outside Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust HQ Chorlton House on 31 St March 2016 at 9:30am. The Trust will meet at a Board meeting to announce their decision if to close 7 front line mental health services; every one of them is needed and absolutely necessary to […]
If these proposed cuts were to be implemented Services Users can expect more medication, more hospitalization, more of a prison service and less of a NHS organisation
MUN Meeting to be held 1: 30 pm Wednesday 30 Th December, 2015 Manchester User’s Network’s (MUN} will hold a meeting of service user, members on Wednesday 30 Th December, 2015 at 1:30pm along with the group, its friends and its network of Service Users and affiliated groups to further plan and organize further actions […]
Welfare cuts will push Britain’s mental health services towards crisis
Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Iain Duncan Smith, recently proposed a further £12 billion of cuts to benefits. Making such cuts is likely to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including those with mental health problems and other disabilities. After all, approximately half of people who need support from the disability benefit Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) do so because of their mental health.
Lil’ Chris’ family issue statement after Lowestoft death
Relatives of singer Lil’ Chris, who was found dead last week, said he had mental health issues and depression.
The 24-year-old, whose real name was Chris Hardman, was found in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on Monday.
A statement from his family said: “Chris had struggled with mental health issues and depression in recent years.
People with mental health problems are less likely than other eligible groups to use personal budgets, which give them direct control over selecting and paying for their own support. But when they do have them, the money is spent in imaginative ways. People tend to select things like gym sessions to manage their health, IT to build social networks and sleep-in support to alleviate mental health problems like paranoia. So why has personalisation not really taken off in mental health?
A Tory councillor has provoked a Twitter backlash after claiming that food banks are only visited by “those with drug, alcohol and mental health problems”.
Mark Winn, who is also a civil servant with the Ministry of Defence and until recently held an appointment on Buckinghamshire council’s health scrutiny committee, hit out at what he called “the BBC doing Labour’s bidding” after watching an episode of Casualty on Saturday night.
Those of us who have been campaigning over the last few years to save public services from government cuts and austerity have been known to say, only half jokingly, that when the Tories are done, there will be “nothing left”. But this isn’t true. Tory austerity measures are a full on ideological assault. Their economic policy masks a concerted attempt to demonise the poorest and encourage people to think that the unemployed, the ill, the disabled, immigrants, asylum seekers and the old aren’t “deserving”. Thus the future is not one without public services. It is one where minimal services are delivered, by privatised corporations, to those who are deemed worthy.
Inside the Notorious Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre
usan wrings her hands and twitches as she speaks, jerking her head from side to side. She is clearly not well. “I ate washing powder to try and kill myself,” says the nervous woman in her fifties. Her eyes flash wild. “It was all I could find. I wanted to die. I would rather die than go back.”
Susan, whose name has been changed, as have those of all the residents quoted in this article, at their own request, says she was a campaigner for human rights in her country of birth in South East Asia but that she fled after her mother was murdered by those she opposed. That trauma forced her to flee to England – not Britain’s superb welfare system or the lax immigration controls that prompted the mayor of the French town of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, to descibe the UK as an “El Dorado” for immigrants last week.
Ending the NHS “Sell off: the abolition of your NHS” (Full Movie)
I will shine a torch on what some doctors see as a glaring omission in the national psyche. I have identified a powerful group of figures within the NHS who are alarmed by the public’s lack of awareness about the abolition of their NHS. This film will follow their arguments right the way up to the Health Secretary’s relinquishing of responsibility for the nation’s health, and will argue that it must be reversed. This film also takes you on a personal journey to a national theme that has massive implications for us all. It will reveal a hidden agenda that’s already having disastrous effects. According to one senior consultant: ‘It’s like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank’. Each of the insiders will speak to us intimately, as if we’re patients in the consulting room. It will be clear that these doctors are people simply doing their jobs by putting their patients’ interests – which are also the viewers’ interests – first. What perhaps will surprise us most is how efficiency and quality will drop. Or, perilously, how close we are to falling forever down a pitiless US-style empty well of no-bucks-no-care. Though the diagnosis remains bleak, the strength of the characters at the film’s disposal should give us surprising hope, casting flashes of light across an otherwise bleak landscape. The style of the film is intimate, hand-held scrupulousness. Interviews will take place in discreet corners of hospitals, surgeries and streets, the images at times elevated by a powerful soundtrack, leaving the viewer with an overall admiration for the doctors’
