Showing posts with label properly integrated. Show all posts
Showing posts with label properly integrated. Show all posts

Monday 29 October 2012

Miliband on mental ill-health - 29 October 2012

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


30 September


A series of what I see as key messages in Tweets





























Then, in a comment on @MarkOneinFour's (Mark Brown's) piece in The Guardian, I said :


I think that the issues raised in this article need to be related to others that were mentioned in the speech:

What Miliband called 'the artificial divide' between physical health and mental health (as if, to one with experiences of stronger cases of either, it were not obvious that poor physical health can affect mood and morale, and how poor mental health impacts on immunity), because if people (GPs included, whose apparent desire for better training was highlighted) appreciated that they are not separate, more might give in the bullishly unforgiving attitudes of those such as Clarkson (much as he wanted to portray Brunel as a great man and for us to vote for him, when it suited).

Miliband rightly drew attention to the fact that the physical health and the mortality of those with long-standing mental-health conditions are far worse, and, although doctors may ask for better training, there has to be a massive shift in attitude, if the chest-pains of someone with a mental-health diagnosis are not, until it proves to be a heart condition, to be ascribed to panic-attacks or anxiety, whereas any other patient is looked at with open eyes.

It is a complete disgrace how, on mental-health units, even patients with diagnosed, pre-existing physical conditions receive - or do not receive - care, and the opposite case, of such a person being in a physical-health ward and needing their mental-health needs understood and not patronized, can be just as bad.

But, whatever the poor starting-point, Miliband is right to identify these issues, and I have tried to draw the half-dozen or so key messages out of his speech in my blog at [URL for this page censored by
The Guardian]:



Next, I shall make another version of this posting, and interpolate comments between the Tweets of Miliband's speech...