Parents should have lessons provided by the government

'Parenting and Public Health' - Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown from curious ostrich on Vimeo.

Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown seems to come from the same school as Sir Harry Burns when she talks about the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the life course but she does admit that adverse events occur in all social groups although at a higher level in disadvantaged groups.

"Research evidence has a great power to persuade," she says; but it is unclear what the data is telling us or what the audience is being persuaded to do; other than propagating the myth of the first three years.

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Recent pronouncements are more forthright:

"Parents should have lessons provided by the government on how to raise their children, Britain's leading public health expert has said."

"Professor John Ashton, outgoing president of the Faculty of Public Health (FPH), said children were neglected by some schools and parents..."

"One in 10 children aged five to 16 years had a mental health problem that warranted support and treatment, the report said."

"And the quality of the parent-child relationship and parenting more broadly played a primary role..."

"Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown, who produced the report, said diet and activity played a role in mental health but `supporting parenting is key. The first 1,001 days of a child's life are particularly important`."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36539279?platform=hootsuite


See Revisiting "The Myth of the First Three Years" [John T. Bruer, Ph.D]

https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/files/2011/09/Special-briefing-on-The-Myth.pdf 

Mental health professionals to be placed in primary schools

"PRIMARY school children in Oxfordshire are set to get help from mental health professionals based in their schools."

"A pilot scheme will see the trained staff attend three primary schools in Oxfordshire from September, with the potential for the programme to be rolled out across the county..."

"Experts said a combination of modern pressures on children and a decreasing taboo around mental illness meant more pupils were being identified as suffering and from a younger age."

"Windmill Primary School headteacher Lynn Knapp said she had seen evidence of primary-aged children self-harming and that mental health issues were more prominent than ever before."

"She said: `There are more demands on children such as curriculum demands and attainment pressures."

"More parents are working, there are less opportunities to talk to them at home and children are more likely to be in school from 7.30 am to 5.30 pm..."

http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/14525416.Primary_school_pupils_to_get_help_from_trained_mental_health_staff/

She seems to be saying that too much school is bad for children`s mental health. The charity Restore has its own ideas and sees increasing social-economic deprivation and austerity as risk factors. The answer: put mental health professionals into schools, but really any excuse will do to get close to children.

Mindhacks questions whether there is a child mental health crises, pointing out that the data is weak, particularly for younger children.

"Are children more likely to report emotional distress in 2016 compared to 1974 even if they feel the same? Really, we don’t know...So talk of a ‘crisis in rising levels of child mental health problems’ is, on balance, an exaggeration, but we shouldn’t dismiss the trends that the data do suggest... One of the strongest is the rise in anxiety and depression in teenage girls."

"All of which brings us to the question- why is there so much talk about a ‘mental health crisis’ in young people if there is no strong data that there is one?"

https://mindhacks.com/2016/05/10/is-there-a-child-mental-health-crisis/

I think we need to look at the growing army of children`s charities to answer that.

Parents take legal action to get children treated closer to home

"Parents whose children have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act are taking legal action to get them treated closer to home."

"Last year, almost half of under 18-year-olds with learning difficulties were placed in hospitals more than 60 miles from home and families have begun to campaign for change."



Adele Hanlon has launched a petition to get her son released

"Eddie Hanlon, 16, has autism, bipolar and epilepsy. For the last two years he has been in a secure unit in Newcastle, 300 miles from his Bristol home."

"His mother Adele gets to see him just once a month and she has set up an online petition to get him out of hospital which has more than 64,000 signatures."　

"Last year, the Government announced it would spend £1.bn on children's mental health care over the next five years and the Department of Health says it is delivering on its commitment to young people's mental health."

"NHS England insists more beds are being made available and additional investment will help. However, the Government says change won't happen overnight."

http://news.sky.com/story/1696244/legal-challenge-over-childrens-mental-health

Psychologising readiness for work

"Eligibility for social security benefits in many advanced economies is dependent on unemployed and underemployed people carrying out an expanding range of job search, training and work preparation activities, as well as mandatory unpaid labour (workfare). Increasingly, these activities include interventions intended to modify attitudes, beliefs and personality, notably through the imposition of positive affect."

"Labour on the self in order to achieve characteristics said to increase employability is now widely promoted. This work and the discourse on it are central to the experience of many claimants and contribute to the view that unemployment is evidence of both personal failure and psychological deficit. The use of psychology in the delivery of workfare functions to erase the experience and effects of social and economic inequalities, to construct a psychological ideal that links unemployment to psychological deficit, and so to authorise the extension of state—and state-contracted—surveillance to psychological characteristics."

http://mh.bmj.com/content/41/1/40.full

This training begins in school where Curriculum for Excellence is supposed to equip children with the skills required for learning, life and work.

Children are encouraged to make individualised statements about their mental and emotional health such as: "I know that we all experience a variety of thoughts and emotions that affect how we feel and behave and I am learning ways of managing them."

Whilst being stripped of essential knowledge in the curriculum, there is an emphasis on confidence, self-esteem, resilience and motivation - as well as group think - for these are the attributes future employers are looking for. They also make children look inwards rather than outwards for explanations when things do not work out.

See https://psychagainstausterity.wordpress.com/

David Healy - Hearts and Minds: Psychotropic Drugs and Violence

Mechanisms of antidepressant-induced violence

"A link between antidepressant use and violence needs a plausible clinical mechanism through which such effects might be realised. There are comparable data on increased rates of suicidal events on active treatment compared to placebo."

"In the case of suicide, several explanations have been offered for the linkage. It is argued that alleviating the motor retardation of depression, the condition being treated, might enable suicides to happen, but this cannot explain the appearance of suicidality in healthy volunteers."

"Mechanisms linking antidepressant treatment, rather than the condition, to adverse behavioural outcomes include akathisia, emotional disinhibition, emotional blunting, and manic or psychotic reactions to treatment. There is good evidence that antidepressant treatment can induce problems such as these and a prima facie case that akathisia, emotional blunting, and manic or psychotic reactions might lead to violence."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1564177/

The trauma inflicted on the nation`s children

By Claire Fox

"Even if you’re not a parent, a teacher or a primary school pupil, you can't have missed that it’s Sats week. The media is drowning in tales of tearful tweens and the trauma being inflicted on the nation's children by the tyranny of testing."

"To be honest, while headlines scream `factory-farming education` and `inhumane testing treadmill`, I want to scream back: `Oh please stop whining`..."

"Why do those on the brink of life's great adventure of adulthood seem so cowed and scared, to the extent that they demand protection from offence? My argument is that fragility is a core part of many young people's identity because we socialised them that way. And that takes me back to primary school. In the book I trace a parallel between over-coddled children - pre-loaded with therapeutic concepts, encouraged to complain at discomfort - and the growing number of over-sensitive, offended young adults in academia. School policies in particular have promoted notions of vulnerability from an early age..."

"Every trope used in relation to the #LetOurKidsBeKids bunk-off presages the problems ahead. The parents' complaint against the government's primary curriculum is that children find it `crashingly dull`, urging teachers instead to teach `stuff that actually interests and engages children`. So lesson number one for these primary school pupils: if your interests aren't catered for, if you don’t enjoy what or how you're being taught, you have a right to storm off in a strop? Once we concede education should be sanitised to cut out the horrible bits, we're setting up future demands for trigger warnings when lectures might contain any material deemed unpleasant."

"But for me the most destructive aspect of phenomena such as Let Our Kids Be Kids is how they incite the young to see their problems through the prism of psychological harm. Irresponsibly, campaigners have asserted that pupils are `traumatised` by the prospect of failing the tests, with Sats blamed for inducing stress, panic-attacks and anxiety. Indeed Natasha Devon (who is co-founder of the appropriately named Self-Esteem Team) fell out with her government masters when she weighed in to the Kids Strike row by declaring `the culture of testing and academic pressure is detrimental to mental health`..."

"Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas, a panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and a regular contributor to TV and radio debates, including Question Time and Any Questions?

http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2016/05/11/stop-whining-about-sats-mollycoddled-children-will-turn-into

My criticism is that she conflates political correctness, mental fragility and testing in primary schools as if these different strands coalesce into a single narrative. That is not necessarily so. It is true that they are all being enacted in the classroom and we have a right to ask, towards what end?

Pupils must take care to exude British values, whatever they are, because they can shift and seem rather strange. For instance, it`s important to tip toe around gender identity these days and there are many more identities than you might think. Diversity is something to celebrate but ethnicity ought not to be mentioned. Sustainable development is an acceptable part of the script but do take care how you express that in terms of environmental activism or you may end up in front of police officers accused of being a future extremist. And don`t forget your family is under surveillance too. Political correctness and the politics of offence is being practised in school, and it is no accident.

As for what is being done about mental health, Clair Fox is correct that children are being pre-loaded with therapeutic concepts. Social and emotional learning is now part of the school curriculum so that if girls and boys speak the language of emotion and sensitivity that is because they have been encouraged to reflect on their feelings ad nauseam. Of course, the one thing children can do is dramatise and play it up; there is no surprise about that. Kids are playful by nature. It is a pity that they do not have a more enriching experience to play around with.

Testing children in primary schools is another dead end. So much of what is going on in school is a complete waste of kids` time. And yes, some of it is harmful. If the only language around to protest is the language of trauma, so be it. It is good to see parents getting involved.

At this point it might be worth having another look at UK Column`s coverage of MAPPA, the Police and Crime Bill and the growing networks around children`s mental health. It begins about 15 minutes into the programme and suggests a much darker agenda is afoot. 

　

See also http://alicemooreuk.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-nurture-room.html

Day four of seven days

From the land which is going to Get it Right for Every Child until they are eighteen:

"We used to live happily in Fife, Scotland with Tianze, but in May 2014 when Tianze was 16 years old ,he was moved to a hospital in Middlesbrough, England, over 200 miles away from home to have an assessment. It was only supposed to be for maximum 6 week assessment?" [Two years later he is still in the system.]

Read about Tianze https://theatuscandal.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/imagining-home/

What is the explanation ?

 

As reported recently in the Islington Gazette in connection with the mother whose autistic son is now trapped in an assessment and treatment unit (ATU) in Colchester, the NHS England spokesman gave the standard response: `Every case is different and patients` needs are often extremely complex...`

In other words, it is as if to say, do not criticise us because we are well meaning people facing extraordinary challenges.

So it was liberating to read Chris Hatton`s blogpost who is an academic at the Centre for Disability Research, Lancaster University:

"While ‘complexity’ seems to be a term to ward off questioning (it’s too complicated for the likes of you to understand), it seems to me more like an admission from professionals that they don’t really understand what’s happening in terms of professionally-derived frameworks for understanding ‘behaviour’ – these frameworks alone are clearly inadequate for helping people."

"And for all the complexities that may be on show (I think it’s a fair bet that putting anyone, me included, into an inpatient unit would result in some complexity of behaviour), people in inpatient units and families seem to talk about what people want out of life in ways that don’t seem terribly complicated to me - a nice place to live, being with people you love and who love you, having a meaning to your life, and so on."

A clear exposition from an academic and well worth a read.
http://chrishatton.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-complexity-complex.html

Sexual identity: a matter of belief?

Or an agenda to confuse the young?

From the Express:

"A supportive mum is allowing her four-year-old son to live as a full-time girl, and is even letting him wear a dress to school."

"Logan Symonds' family see the move as the next step for the young boy, and say he has believed he is a girl since he was just 18 months."

"Mum Emma Symonds, 34, from Gloucester, said: `Letting Logan wear a pinafore to school was a big step for us all.`"

"`I've been letting him live as a girl and wear girls' clothes since he turned three, and a couple of months ago I agreed he could grow his hair long.`"

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/four-year-old-boy-believes-7801877?ICID=FB_mirror_main

See Sex change regret

Stephen Fry`s insensitive remarks about child abuse survivors

"In an interview with Dave Rubin on the American talk show ‘Rubin Report’ ... the writer, actor, presenter, and all round national treasure Stephen Fry decided that `self pity` by survivors of child sexual abuse was an appropriate target for his ire."

"Fry’s argument focused on censorship and the `deep infantilism` he perceives in today’s society. The discussion included mentions of the unsuccessful Oxford University petition to remove a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes and the application of so-called `trigger warnings` to literature."

"Fry remarked that many great plays contain scenes of rape and murder, including Shakespearian classics such as Titus Andronicus and Macbeth. `They’re terrible things and they have to be thought about, clearly,` Fry said, `but if you say you can’t watch this play… [because] it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place, well I’m sorry.`"

"`It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self pity gets none of my sympathy. Self pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity. Get rid of it, because no one’s going to like you if you feel sorry for yourself. Just grow up...`"

"The language Fry uses is so utterly patronizing that it strips his wider points, about the inability of some to engage with complex issues, of any real value. To belittle someone’s childhood experience of being abused by a family member and reduce it to ‘uncle touched you in a nasty place’ is deeply callous and irresponsible."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/stephen-fry-which-child-sexual-abuse-victim-do-you-think-changed-their-mind-about-trigger-warnings-a6980546.html