Layer 419 . . . Mental Health, Women (and Men, and Children) in Crisis, Education, Pills, League Tables, Bankers, Giffords, Palin and the Tea Party

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Time to get back to the newspapers for a dose of harsh reality . . .  for a top-up of disgust at the state of the world.

If anyone happened to read Layers 412 and 417  and thought I was over the top with my comments about miserable, burnt-out young people and the amount of mental health issues in our society, then think again.

"Is it any wonder that so many children, and so many adults, are borderline insane? And so many of them are . . . literally . . . driven insane. Or become morose, depressed, angry and resentful."

This week the Guardian carried this report:

Mental health of women in crisis

According to survey of 2,000 girls and women, around two-thirds have had mild to moderate mental health problems

by Amelia Hill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jan/11/mental-health-women-crisis

Almost a third of women aged over 18 have taken antidepressants, according to research published today which its authors claim reveals "generations of women in crisis" with mental health problems.

According to a survey of more than 2,000 girls and women in England and Wales, around two-thirds have had mild to moderate mental health problems, equivalent to 15.2 million girls and women.

Penny Newman, chief executive of Platform 51 (formerly the Young Women's Christian Association), said: "Millions of girls and women are facing mental health problems and they are telling us that they are not getting the support they need."

At least 13% of women experiencing mental health problems had quit a job while 44% had taken some time off work; more than a quarter had been off work for at least a week, the research showed.

The findings into the extent of mental health problems experienced by girls as young as 12 were reached after the group expanded the medical definition of "common mental health disorders" as defined by the Department of Health.

The definition of mental health problems used in the new study includes low self-esteem, poor self-confidence, and stress.

"This term captures the range of feelings and symptoms which negatively impact on girls' and women's mental health and which can have more serious consequences if undetected or unaddressed," said Newman.

"What is most striking about these behaviours is that they are often self-destructive and hidden."

About 20% of adult women in England suffered from a common mental disorder – typically depression or anxiety – compared with about 12% of men, according to an NHS report last year.

Professor Louise Howard, head of women's mental health at King's College London, said the figures were "very interesting and relevant". She said: "There is evidence that there is under-identification of people with mental health problems that need treatment."

The research includes women with emotional difficulties as well as those with mental health problems, she added. "But any of the stresses that these women are reporting can lead to mental health problems. Depressive symptoms can persist and need treatment but some women will feel that they have to keep on coping because they have all these people depending on them."

Platform 51 works with 11,000 girls and women in schools, community centres, youth clubs, mother and baby units, and prisons across England and Wales. Its study found those they identified as having mental health problems attempt to cope with their distress in damaging ways. More than a quarter regularly drink too much and many isolate themselves from friends and family: almost a half had not left their homes for a long period and more than a quarter had lost friends.

One in five had built up debt. One in 10 had self-harmed – a figure that rises to 35% for women aged 18 to 24.

"Many women appear to be functioning normally or coping adequately with particularly difficult situations when in fact they are struggling to cope," said Newman. "But we identified many risky behaviours that girls and women engaged in as a result of mental health problems, including promiscuity, drug-taking and crime."

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, said: "This survey is shocking and covers a myriad of distress."

Colin Walker, policy and campaigns manager at mental health charity Mind, welcomed the report but said his organisation's research showed men and women experienced mental health problems such as depression and anxiety in roughly equal numbers.

"But men are less likely to speak out or ask for help," he said. "This tendency to suffer in silence is reflected by the fact that men account for 75% of all suicides."

Around one in three women with low-level mental health problems have never sought professional help, the report, "Women Like Me: supporting wellbeing in girls and women", found. Of those who did seek help, almost two thirds felt doctors were too ready to prescribe drugs.

So here's more evidence that huge numbers of people have mental, emotional, social and spiritual afflictions, who also know that getting drugs from doctors is NOT the answer to their problems.

How and why do these afflictions occur in the first place? What can possibly be done about them?

Why do so many of us suffer from  low self-esteem, poor self-confidence, and stress? Why haven't we learned how to overcome these problems? Why don't schools and other agencies do more to prevent these problems occurring in the first place?

Well - nobody asked them to. Not in this country. On the whole. Nowhere is it a requirement to ensure that pupils acquire more resilience, self confidence, and high self-esteem. Nowhere are these things prioritised any more. Maybe in some schools here and there, where the leadership is more enlightened, but there's no expectations - not seriously - from government, bureaucrats or Ofsted, whose sole concern is with academic success and test results. It's an appalling situation.

We all let our hearts bleed about the poor sods who are cracking up all around us, in so many ways, and all we do about it is send these people to get their anti-depressant drugs to help them 'cope'. These are people who ought to have been able to develop their emotional intelligence, social intelligence and spiritual intelligence whilst at school, in order to prepare them for living in the big wide world, and all they got was pressure to achieve in exams - in order that the schools could do well in the league tables and deal with the Ofsted inquisition.

Look at these schools squealing today, as the government shifts the goal posts once again, and they suddenly find themselves failing to meet the arbitrary targets again. Not so smug now, eh? So why haven't they been doing more to fight the very idea of targets, league tables and so on? Surely not because they thought they were doing pretty well . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jan/12/1-in-6-get-english-baccalaureate

Notice how the schools are now being accused of "failing to prepare pupils for the workplace". NOT 'prepare them for living in a challenging and complex world'. Not ' prepare them for managing complex relationships'. No - we just want them to be able to satisfy the demands of employers. That'll do nicely.

Meanwhile lives are wasted and ruined, kids are getting burnt out by the age of eighteen, and they'll very likely end up stressed out, depressed and lacking in self-esteem even if they get a pocketful of exam passes.

This all makes me beyond anger.

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A good comment from Winhill:

It isn't just women, although they might be more up for admitting it. Our society is fundamentally sick.

I don't think most people realise anything else is possible. Try travelling and you find otherwise. Try going to sub-Saharan Africa for example. They may be poor, but they have a general culture which is far more kind and supportive, and they don't spend their whole time being terrified of each other like the British do.

But then, why should it be a surprise that we are sick? Values of brutal competition, insecurity and the-weak-go-to-the-wall have been deliberately inculcated by neoliberalism. As Thatcher said "economics are the method. The object is to change the heart and soul". She changed it alright.

Some people can cope with living in a brutal, insecure environment, but many can't. They just crumble.

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Our world, our society, doesn't have to be like this - relentlessly, competitively materialistic; full of greedy arsehole bankers whose stupidity and selfishness is already well-established; where mental ill-health is the norm rather than the exception.

Banks given go-ahead to pay unlimited bonuses


Ministers cave in to City and reject calls to tackle highest earners as No 10 seeks face-saving deal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jan/10/banks-unlimited-bonuses-ministers

Britain's banks have been given the go-ahead to pay unlimited bonuses, drawing to a close a two-year political battle to rein in the City.

After months in which a series of government ministers of all parties have threatened a toughening in the stance over City bonuses, Downing Street said the government did not intend to intervene in the pay of the UK's top bankers.

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How insane is this - Sarah Palin has accused her opponents of inciting hatred and violence . . .

Fucking insane.

In the US, where hate rules at the ballot box, this tragedy has been coming for a long time

The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords may lead to the temporary hibernation of rightwing rage, but it is encoded in conservative DNA

by Michael Tomasky

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/09/us-shooting-republicans-giffords-loughner

Gabrielle Giffords shooting reignites row over rightwing rhetoric in US

Sarah Palin at centre of storm over political vitriol after spree leaves six dead and congresswoman in critical condition

by Ewen MacAskill

The US was tonight seized by a fierce debate over whether inflammatory rightwing rhetoric was to blame for a shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, that targeted congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and left six dead, including a nine-year-old child.

Giffords, 40, who remains critically ill in hospital after being shot through the head but is expected to live, criticised Sarah Palin last year for putting her and 19 other Democrats on a hitlist of districts, each shown as being in crosshairs.

"When people do that, they have got to realise there are consequences to that action," Giffords said. Palin today distanced herself from the shooting, as did leading figures of the Tea Party movement. Conservative bloggers accused liberals of seeking to exploit the attack.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/09/gabrielle-giffords-shooting-rightwing-rhetoric

Insanity Rules. OK?

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Layer 42 Results, Results, Results.

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I thought I’d said all there is to say about SATs and testing, but Anne Atkins was back on the subject on Today’s Radio 4 Thought for the Day.

Nothing new or original, really, but more emphasis being given to what a futile, nasty and destructive business it all is. She spoke about how education was originally seen as something that was for the benefit of the individual, and learning was just for learning’s sake, and for the sake of the students - not for any other purpose.

She said that we’ve come to believe that every talent can be measured, which is clearly nonsense. Even the believers in SATs don’t believe that, unless they’re complete morons. The mad satters try to maintain that SATs are just a routine, low-key, end of key stage procedure that needn’t take up a lot of time and energy -which is downright dishonest and stupid, to say the least.

Anne, on the other hand, was keen to make the point that love can’t be assessed, and neither can being a good parent. Nor can ‘character’. She concluded that any quality that can be weighed and measured is not much more than that.

I just wish I could believe that this steady chiseling away at the nonsense that we currently take to be real education is having any impact on the thinking of the people who have been promoting the system we currently have in this country. I still seriously doubt it. They embrace it like a religion, and in the absence of any inclination to properly debate an intelligent rationale for our system they will go on clinging to their fundamentalist beliefs.

The stupid tendency will go on parroting their idiot mantras - “We need to drive up standards . . . Too many children are failing to master basic skills . . . We need to prepare children for the jobs market . . . There is no excuse for failure . . . SATs are just 5 days of testing at the end of a key stage . . . We need to measure the performance of schools and teachers . . . High standards are not incompatible with enjoyment of school and a rich curriculum.” Bollocks - all of it.

The problem with these fuckwits is that they have no concept of what life is really like in schools where there is no critical mass of able children, and no experience of the problems of running schools where there are huge issues with the recruitment and retention of able and well-trained staff.

They have no understanding of the impact of government directives and strategies, and an Ofsted regime that cares only to analyse spurious data. They have no clue as to the way in which school managers and governors are demoralized and terrorized into turning their schools into results factories, and to hell with the wellbeing, creativity and enjoyment of school of millions of children, both the able and the less able who struggle to cope with the rigid demands of the system.

Crime and Disorder

Half an hour before the Anne Atkins piece, and also half an hour after it, there were reports on the huge amounts of money that have been spent on locking up young offenders, and on the excessive use of custody and criminalisation, with no measurable impact on crime reduction and prevention. This is the big news of the day, according to the BBC. We lock up a much higher number proportionately than any other civilized country. The cost of this custody has been met from moving money out of the education, social services and housing budgets. We’re spending £280m a year on locking up our criminal youth, and £24m on crime ‘prevention’.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that we need to spend more money on both education and rehabilitation, as well as on better housing and proper community policing, and less on being the best friend of the USA in its imperialistic adventures and its 'war on terror'? It's a similar issue really - first you make people angry, and then you bash them over the head and put them in detention for expressing their anger in the only ways they know how.

Why are we not rehabilitating our young offenders? Why are we not reducing re-offending? Why are crime prevention measures not working? Duh! Why are we still asking these dumb questions?

Let’s go through this again. We take money away from the education and the developmental needs of young people, from work with families, and from community development. We alienate more kids by providing an education system that cares nothing for the real well-being of children - an education system that causes them to be competitive, stressed, depressed and angry with the system that brands them as failures or also- rans, which of course is what most kids are, according to our system of grading and measuring.

We take away their enjoyment of school. We pay no attention to developing children’s crucial emotional, social and spiritual intelligences. We don’t give a damn about developing creativity and imagination, let alone caring, loving and enjoying life - every minute of every day.

We drill them in classrooms where the emphasis is on competition rather than collaboration and cooperation. We reduce opportunities for creative interaction and conversation. We never let them play and learn in situations where they need to develop skills of cooperation and dialogue, where they’re allowed to work out their own problems, rivalries, jealousies, with minimal intervention from adults who know them well and are concerned to develop their individuality, and are well trained to do this.

We spend virtually no time on developing their understanding of concepts and vocabulary around human values, morality and ethics. We never let them ask questions about real issues. We give them no understanding of philosophy, let alone experience of Socratic debate and dialogue. We give them no time for proper reflection or meditation.

We drill them and regiment them and dress them in uniform. We give no encouragement towards individuality, let alone encourage them to develop their unique human ‘voice’. We exclude them from activities they genuinely enjoy, and we remove any notion of learning through play.

We exclude them from school for petty breaches of discipline, including not wearing the approved shoes and socks. We exclude permanently the less able (who are going to mess up the school’s statistics) at the first possible opportunity, often on the flimsiest of pretexts.

And we wonder why they turn out to be anti-social, angry, unable to exercise self-discipline, bitter, resentful, depressed, psychopathic and thoroughly fucked up. And that’s just the ones who do well in SATs and GCSEs.

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Children and families cope with their lives and make something of themselves in spite of, not because of, the pathetic systems of education and social support that we have in this increasingly materialistic and nasty society we’ve been creating since the beginning of the Thatcher-inspired counter-revolution against progressive values and social democratic politics.

If children and young people don’t turn out to be basket cases it’s primarily down to their own resilience and spirit, and the support they get from loving parents, and some very caring teachers who do right by them in spite of excessive work loads and demands for treating the kids like units of production.

Brain-washing the kids into conformity and willingness to cram for tests, and to do ever-increasing amounts of homework from the age of 5, is now the name of the game.

The education system is a mess, and everyone knows it, though virtually no-one is willing to admit it. It’s architects have been people like Thatcher, Baker, Blunkett, Woodhead, Barber, Blair . . . and Adonis! And now we have Balls and . . . Jim Knight! Hurrah!

The only decent Secretary of State for Education we’ve had in the past 20 years, the only one with any experience of teaching (in secondary schools only, admittedly), the only one who spoke from knowledge and conviction and from the heart, without briefing notes, has been Estelle Morris - and she resigned because the system was beyond being steered by a single individual in a proper progressive direction, and it was doing her head in. At least that’s my take on her demise.

Coincidentally she was a student in Coventry (at the College of Education, where I went to many a disco, in spite of not being a student there myself) at the same time as me, graduating a couple of years after I did. I like to think that teaching in a Coventry comprehensive school did her a power of good, at least in terms of seeing real life and real working-class kids and families from the perspective of a class teacher. Coventry was the first city to adopt comprehensive education and build new comprehensive schools. The one I attended was on a large green-field site, the first in the country, and was totally brilliant, apart from the odd teacher, like the one who tried to teach me to speak German for 5 years. And even he wasn’t a bad old boy.

Individual schools may do well by their kids in spite of the system, not because of it. The system does not encourage doing well by the kids. The system does not care about the kids. Not really. The system cares about results.

Results. Results. Results.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7411909.stm

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This is what Polly Toynbee had to say about Estelle Morris at the time of her resignation:

She never played the Westminster game. She spoke gently and intelligently, made reasoned arguments persuasively. Anyone who heard her fine speech in Blackpool - the best and the best received of the conference - knows that she has done herself a grave injustice, fatally colluding with her thuggish attackers. But in a state of meltdown, people do and say the wrong thing. "There! That proves it! She couldn't take the heat," says Westminster. Why should she - or anyone else?

Some say her unwarranted insecurity springs from her own failed education, failed A-levels and a retreat to a teacher training college at the age of 18. School failure - at 11 or 18 - often does scar for life. Even those who rise above it later can find that in adversity and under stress, lacking the false affirmation of paper qualifications, they buckle under the illusion that they are essentially stupid and will be "found out", as they were at school. (As an 11+ failure with one A-level, I should know.) People retain a mystic faith in old exam results or in the snap judgments of school reports, dogged by lazy character assassinations for the rest of their days. That is why education should always try to praise a child's talents, not brand it with failure. These things she knew well, and it made her a humane politician and a good education minister.

What made her job unendurable was the perpetual interference of Downing Street's bright young men, filling the prime minister's head with their not so bright ideas. She was never in favour of the spread of yet more faith schools. Nor was she in favour of anything that smacked of a return to selection at 11.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/oct/25/publicservices.gender
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estelle_Morris
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2355059.stm


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The Dalai Lama is in the House.

Visit the following page for details of what religious nutters can be like when they fall out with one another. Talk about spiritual intelligence!

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080520/tuk-britain-china-tibet-protest-a7ad41d.html

“A Buddhist group on Tuesday announced plans to picket public appearances in Britain by the Dalai Lama, accusing him of restricting religious freedoms in his homeland and among exiled Tibetans. The Western Shugden Society, a branch of Tibetan Buddhism that reveres a god denounced by the Dalai Lama since 1996, said demonstrations were planned outside Britain's parliament and at several other locations on his 11-day tour.”

Layer 16 Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, The Dalai Lama.

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To finish off this series of blogs on Buddhism and spiritual intelligence, this is what Christmas Humphries had to say on:

The Effects of Satori.

Satori is seeing into one’s own nature, and seeing that Nature is not one’s own. The vision (or the experience of satori) may come quite suddenly or slowly arise. It is in no way to be confused with a psychic trance or the phantasy of the schizophrenic. Nor is it concerned with morality or any man-made code. It is a foretaste of the Absolute Moment, of Cosmic Consciousness, of the condition in which I and my Father are one.

The effects of Zen (and Zen means Satori) are proportionate to the degree of Satori attained. Sometimes the happy man would burst into a song or an improvised poem; sometimes he merely laughed, and it is to be noted that no other religion or philosophy has used, as Zen deliberately uses, laughter as a means to a spiritual end. Roars of laughter, cleansing, healthy, ferocious laughter, are part of the Zen monk’s daily life and of those who practice Zen.

Others who have tried to describe the reward of their years of tremendous effort speak of a sense of certainty, of serenity, of clarity, and of unity with nature and the universe around.

Hui-neng described the serenity:

Imperturbable and serene the ideal man practices no virtue;
Self-possessed and dispassionate he commits no sin;
Calm and silent he gives up seeing and hearing;
Even and upright his mind abides nowhere.

With clarity of mind, whence emotion and passion have ebbed away, comes an inner certainty of purpose and the right way to achieve it. And the certainty is quite impersonal.

But the mind, though aloof from the senses’ attraction, is never in the clouds of an ideal world. There is a vital sense of here and this and now. The student achieves a sense of the Absolute Moment, and knows that all things are equally important, equally real and unreal, equally part of himself. The flower in the crannied wall is indeed the universe, and nothing exists beyond this life that is not contained within it.

These new possessions of the mind, however, are not of immediate growth; they develop anew with each experience. For a while occasional vision may have no effect on character, for the momentum of old habits of thought and thought-reaction is immensely strong.

Yet slowly a new sense of values supersedes the old; truly a new man is born, and the sustained and tremendous effort to reach the new stage on the path of development was found to be worthwhile.

The Self has taken over, and the appetites of a pack of ill-trained animals which yelp and growl and bite at each other, have at least been recognised as such. If they do slip off the lead sometimes, it is at least with the master’s knowledge, if not with his consent. And that is a long stage on the way to Enlightenment.

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The Dalai Lama

It’s interesting how, after decades of hearing nothing but positive things said about the Dalai Lama, insofar as one heard anything at all, the news media now regularly report on China’s condemnation of this unique figure, and it’s interesting the way in which China does it without actually referring to him in person, preferring to say “The Dalai Clique” does this or that or the other. They deliberately make it sound as though he’s the leader of some sort of minor would-be revolutionary gang, agitating for the liberation of his homeland, Tibet, from what he sees as the clutches of the communist imperialists.

All the Dalai Lama can then do is insist that he accepts the fact of Tibet being part of China, but protests about the oppression of native Tibetans and the suppression of their Buddhist faith. He wants to see more autonomy and more religious freedom for Tibet, whilst it remains politically within China’s control.

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Here’s what he says in Ancient Wisdom, Modern World - Ethics for the New Millenium.

We all desire to be happy and avoid suffering, and are sustained in this quest by hope.

People in the wealthier countries seem to be more prone to mental and emotional suffering. There is a disturbing prevalence among these people of anxiety, discontent, frustration, uncertainty and depression. They also suffer a growing confusion as to what constitutes morality and what its foundations are.

People feel uneasy and dissatisfied with their lives. They experience feelings of isolation, and often depression. Psychological and emotional suffering is often found amongst great material wealth throughout the west.

On the one hand their wealth allows them to have increasing levels of autonomy and private ownership of expensive homes and goods, and on the other hand they have little interdependence and tend not to see that their personal happiness has any connection with the happiness and wellbeing of others.

In effect they create societies in which people find it harder and harder to show one another basic affection. [And neither do they feel a need to do so.] In place of a sense of community and belonging we find a high degree of loneliness and alienation.

The contemporary rhetoric of growth and economic development greatly reinforces people’s tendency toward competitiveness and envy. No wonder so many people are afflicted by stress-related disease. Such disproportionate emphasis on external progress and material wealth is bound to result in unhappiness, anxiety and lack of contentment.

Scientific knowledge alone cannot provide the happiness that springs from inner development, the happiness that is not reliant on external factors. Indeed, though our very detailed and specific knowledge of external phenomena is an immense achievement, far from bringing us happiness it can actually be dangerous. It can cause us to lose touch with the wider reality of human experience and, in particular, to overlook our dependence on others.

Consciousness belongs to that category of phenomena without form, substance or colour. [It is metaphysical] It is not susceptible to investigation by external means.

The challenge we face is to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquillity of traditional communities while benefitting fully from the material developments of the world as we find it at the dawn of a new millennium.

There is an abundance of severely negative trends within modern society. There is no reason to doubt the escalation in murder, violence and rape cases year by year. We hear constantly of abusive and exploitative relationships both in the home and within the wider community, of growing numbers of young people addicted to drugs and alcohol.

None of these problems are by nature inevitable. They are all ethical problems. They each reflect our understanding of what is right and wrong, of what is positive and what is negative, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. But beyond this is something more fundamental: a neglect of what I call our inner dimension.

It’s obvious that our needs transcend the material and merely sensual. The prevalence of anxiety, stress, confusion, uncertainty and depression among those whose basic needs have been met is a clear indication of this.

Our problems, both those we experience externally such as wars crime and violence, and those we experience internally - our emotional and psychological sufferings - cannot be solved until we address this underlying neglect.

That is why the great movements of the last hundred years and more - democracy, liberalism, socialism [toryism, neo-conservatism] - have all failed to deliver the universal benefits they were supposed to provide, despite many wonderful ideas.

A revolution is called for, certainly. But not a political, an economic, or even a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the last century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.