Happiness Will Prevail
Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who featured a storyline in which The Doctor was transported to a land ruled by so-called happy people, a land in which sadness is illegal and punished by the...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Olympic Park: a sea of ugly
Yesterday I decided to have a walk through the Olympic Park, which opened a couple of weeks ago after having been closed since the end of the Olympics in 2012. I was excited that...
Hunt opposes segregation (when it's Muslims doing it)
BBC News – Hunt to warn against schools extremism in Birmingham At a time when a “secret” report about a Muslim plot to take over schools in Birmingham and run them according to Islamic...
Muslim “has job” shock
Harry's Place, a malicious website which is devoted to exposing Muslims as extremists wherever they appear to have influence, today exposed the fact that a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir works as … a psychiatrist. Someone...
Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry: Will they tackle learning disability abuse?
This morning, I saw on the Facebook group for Invest in ME a link to an article on the Mad in America website announcing the launch of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry (CEP), which...
Start of 107 days for LB
This is the anniversary of Connor Sparrowhawk going into the Slade House learning disability unit in Oxford, where he died 107 days later, in the bath, as a result of staff negligence. His supporters...
When will Google fix the Chrome wi-fi bug?
I've been using Linux on the desktop (and laptop) since about 2003, and I've seen it progress from being something that didn't work with most of the hardware I had access to (including the...
Katherine Bowes-Lyon’s death prompts outpouring of sycophancy
Yesterday I read on the Telegraph‘s website that Katherine Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of the Queen who was severely mentally disabled and had lived in an institution most of her life, had died aged 87....
What would Justice for LB look like?
This past week, since the publication of the report into the preventable death of Connor Sparrowhawk in a learning disability mental health unit in Oxford last July, my timeline has been buzzing with reactions...
“Vote Red or get Blue” doesn’t work everywhere
“Want the Tories out next year? Only one way to do it” from Ron’s Rants Ron Graves explains in the post above that if you want to get rid of the Tories in 2015,...
Sarah Vibert and her daughters: reunite them!
This morning I read a news report and a blog about a single mother who is fighting to keep her two daughters out of the foster care system in Alberta, and find them a...
Four years too short for “one-punch” killing
It's been reported recently that a man who killed a man with one punch on a street in Bournemouth has been sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison (see also today's Daily Mirror), which means...
“Royal housing benefit” story is irresponsible
The Queen and Prince Charles cash in on tens of thousands of pounds' worth of benefits every year – Mirror Online The Daily Mirror yesterday ran with a story about how the royal estates,...
“Let it not be about lessons learned”
Today the report into the death (PDF) of Connor Sparrowhawk, an 18-year-old who drowned in an NHS learning disability unit in Oxford last July (see earlier entry), was published. That it was published was...
“Awaiting final written permission” (updated)
Update 5:43pm: The report is out. My response is scheduled for publication at 6:30pm GMT. Southern Health: report publication update Southern Health, the NHS trust responsible for the death of Connor Sparrowhawk in one...
A plug for QTM
You probably know by now that (like most blogs) this blog uses WordPress. What's less obvious is the software I normally use to write entries, and that's because I write it myself and rarely...
Rise in teens admitted to adult psych wards
It was reported today that there has been a rise in the number of teenagers under 18 admitted to adult psychiatric wards, and that these were sometimes hundreds of miles from home and often...
CyModding your LG G-Pad
So, last week I got my replacement for my iPad, which I was dissatisfied with because of the completely inadequate Apple keypad (see earlier entry). I looked for a similar size Android tablet, because...
The hidden costs of private schooling
I’ve just had my second letter in about a month published in the New Statesman, a British left-of-centre political magazine, this time on the subject of private education, which they ran an extensive feature...
The dangers of racism in the anti-FGM crusade
The Thursday before last was apparently “Zero Tolerance of FGM day”, accompanied by widespread media coverage of various campaigns against it, a petition which apparently gained two signatures per second, interviews with anti-FGM campaigners...