Comments on: Panorama and other media coverage of the Gilderdale affair

By: John Ware does hatchet job on Muslim schools | Indigo Jo Blogs

John Ware does hatchet job on Muslim schools | Indigo Jo Blogs — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:48:39 +0000

[…] and you often end up with a shallow and sentimental human interest story like this one ([1], [2]), which fails to ask important question about such matters as the abuse and poor treatment of the […]

By: Indigo Jo Blogs — Gilderdale, Schiavo and models of disability

Indigo Jo Blogs — Gilderdale, Schiavo and models of disability — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:44:26 +0000

[…] didn’t watch Pratchett’s lecture, but I did watch the Panorama as I wrote in an earlier entry. I thought it was somewhat sentimental and that there was not enough investigation; the question of […]

By: Indigo Jo

Indigo Jo — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:10:38 +0000

I used the quotes around “merely” not to attribute them to “Dr Crippen” but to indicate that I don’t think there’s anything “mere” about it — I have an uncle who has been hospitalised a number of times from it. However, her symptoms were obviously physical, and his tone was rather dismissive of her condition. As I said, whatever you want to call her illness, she was obviously ill.

As for the last part of your comment: people show grief (or not) in different ways, and just because someone is not obviously distressed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t, and even if they aren’t, it’s not proof against them.

By: Thersites

Thersites — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:17:21 +0000

“merely” is your own term for psychiatric illness, not Dr, Crippen’s, nor do psychiatrists think that people like Lynn Gilderdale are “malingering”, as you put it. ME, like many supposedly psychiatric illnesses, is defined by behaviour, with the aetiology unknown; spinal inflammation has many possible causes, possibly including the way Lynn Gilderdale had lived for the last seventeen years. The fact is, that whatever caused Lynn Gilderdale’s condition, doctors have not been able properly to deternine it and diaghoses are more useful to medical self-esteem than anything else. “The fact that parents were expected to keep the sufferers active, when what they really required was rest, was not brought up.”, you say. However, rest did not do Lynn any good in the end and in some instances of people behaving similarly enforced exercise has benefitted the patient; if a “cure” for her original condition could have been found, would Lynn have been able to benefit, given the effects of her life over the last seventeen years? Whatever term is used for what was wrong with her, the fact is, no-one really knew, and all they could do was look hopefully then desperately for possible alleviations.

As for the second-hand disgnoses such as “Mrs Gilderdale seemed “too composed” at times and that “she even smiled while saying the most difficult things”. “:

If a man who turnips cries, Cries not when his father dies, Is it proof that he had rather Have a turnip than a father?

It reflects the confidence in their rightness that is usually helpful to doctors and often helpful to patients but which- as with Angela Cannings- can be disastrous if thought to be justified by others.