Educating social workers about ME
The other night, I was at a screening of the film Voices from the Shadows at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which had been convened by the school’s film club as...
Category: Disability
How well does the Muslim community accommodate special needs?
After Shahadah – MuslimMatters.org The above article is about how the Muslim community accommodates converts, and these issues have long been discussed on various websites including the blogs that sprung up in the mid-2000s...
ME sufferer died because she couldn’t eat
University graduate Lois Owen, 34, died after her weight plummeted to just 3st 2lbs | This is Derbyshire (also reproduced on the ME Association site) Lois Owen achieved a first-class honours degree from the...
Welfare Reform Bill and the Royal Assent petition
Recently someone put up a petition online calling on the Queen to refuse Royal Assent to the impending Welfare Reform Bill (i.e. to veto it), to which Sue Marsh, co-author of the Spartacus Report,...
Social-worker bashers’ wilful blindness
On Monday night, BBC2 broadcast a documentary titled Protecting Our Children, the first of a series of three programmes which follows a social worker in Bristol as they deal with one of their child...
“One Born Every Minute”: learning disabilities, babies and marriage
One Born Every Minute is a series on Channel 4 (UK) which features women giving birth, and the nurses and midwives who attend to them. They feature two women (or couples, if the man...
“If Rod Liddle really wants M.E., he can have mine”
Yesterday, Rod Liddle had a venomous article printed in the Sun newspaper on page 13, which suggested that he might like to become disabled so that he could claim money off the state and...
PIP won’t cut the disability budget
Last Tuesday, BBC 5 Live’s morning discussion presenter Victoria Derbyshire hosted an interview with Maria Miller, the minister responsible for disabled people in the UK, and various disability activists including Kaliya Franklin of Spartacus...
Just published: Kaliya Franklin interview transcript
I have just published a transcript of an interview Kaliya Franklin, one of the major authors of the “Spartacus” report I blogged about here, that she gave to Resonance FM which was broadcast yesterday...
The Mail, Gerada and the alternative to DLA
Recently a group of people with various disabilities and chronic illnesses (some of them in very precarious health, two of them having been admitted to hospital in the last few days and two others...
Ayn van Dyk: seized for no reason, spends 10th birthday in care
Single father fighting to get autistic daughter back This report tells part of the ongoing story of Ayn van Dyk, who was seized from her home, which she shared with her father and two...
Yes, but do they have ME?
Unidentified Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is a major cause of school absence: surveillance outcomes from school-based clinics (at BMJ Open) This morning several news sources reported that a study had been published by...
Review: Voices from the Shadows, British Library, London
A German version of this review can be found here. Yesterday I finally got to see Voices from the Shadows, a documentary about severe ME produced and directed by the same people that produced...
Baron-Cohen on Anders Breivik
Anders Breivik: cold and calculating, yes – but insane? (from today's Guardian) This article by Simon Baron-Cohen appeared in today's Guardian and questions the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia given him by "independent" experts in...
The Bowes-Lyons at Earlswood: “a peg to hang it on”
TV review: The Queen's Hidden Cousins; Waking Up To Insomnia; Symphony | Television & radio | The Guardian Last night I saw a documentary on Channel 4 titled The Queen's Hidden Cousins (that is...
Daily Mail advocates waste of taxpayers’ money
Disabled benefit? Just fill in a form: 200,000 got handouts last year without face-to-face interview | Mail Online Throughout today, I’ve been receiving tweets with the hashtag #MyDLA, from people telling what the benefit...
BBC bashes benefit claimants two weeks running
I’m a little late writing about this, but I watched John Humphries’ programme on BBC2, The Future State of Welfare, a few days after it was broadcast (I was working a night shift the...
A ghoulish hobby
Last night I watched a programme on BBC Three titled "Stormchaser: the Butterfly and the Tornado", about a woman with EB (a skin condition) who goes storm-chasing in America. (You can watch it on...
How severe is severe?
In July 2011, a new set of criteria for diagnosing ME were published, under the authorship of most of the major researchers involved in the ME or "CFS" field (Byron Hyde is absent, however)....
Why some people find the “mong” joke funny (and some don’t)
This past week, Ricky Gervais offended an awful lot of people with a joke about a "mong face" on Twitter. "Mong", for those who still don't know, originally meant someone with Down's syndrome, back...