Sally's Journal

Benefit Cuts

2025-03-19T09:28:07Z

Regarding Wes Streeting's TOTAL BULLSHIT WANKERISHNESS on 'overdiagnosis of mental health'.

First of all, I hates him.

Secondly, I want to be clear that recent stats from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (who I have worked with extensively and know to be a really decent organisation) are quite clear - those on the highest benefit for disabled people signed off from work have a physical disability in the vast majority of cases.
The data was obtained from the Department for Work and Pensions under freedom of information. They found that five in every six people receiving the benefit with a mental health condition had at least one physical condition as well and 90% of the forecast spending growth on personal independence payments (Pip) between now and 2030 will be for those who get both components – meaning they are people with significant difficulties with mobility and conducting daily tasks such as washing and cooking.

But finally, and to give him the very teeniest and tiniest bit of credit, he touched on something my CPN and I have chatted about a bit. My CPN is my 'community psychiatric nurse' who I see every couple of weeks to check that I'm sane enough to be allowed out in public.

One of the things she has said (and her predecessor) is that while I may fret that I'm wasting their time, I'm actually the kind of patient that the service is designed for. Which is to say I'm someone with a measurable medical problem that can be treated by medical methods, like pills etc. An increasing number of their patients are...not exactly that. So, in some ways I guess Streeting is right. Except he's also totally wrong.

Jess (my CPN)'s most recent comment was that so many of her patients are really not coping, but that's not because they have shonky brain chemistry. It's because *life* is really hard to cope with. We live in a world where it's really hard to get secure housing, where you might not be able to feed your child, where you are in impossible situations where your partner is abusive, but if you leave, you face rough sleeping. Young LGBTQ+ people are facing increasing levels of social exclusion. There's a huge sense of anxiety about the future. Jobs are more demanding. The cost of living means that the working poor are struggling more and more. The NHS is struggling and people are trying to live with significant levels of pain for extended periods.

And a lot of the people she sees *aren't* coping and she can't really help them because the solutions they need are social solutions, not medical. Still, they end up being pushed into the CMHT because there's no one else really and they do their best. So they might be supporting the single mother who is having a breakdown because she is trying to raise 3 kids in a single room and can't find a permanent flat and is skipping meals so her kids can eat and her boss is yelling at her for being off work when her child is in hospital. But no one can help her with the job or the kids or the housing. So they shove her to the CMHT and ask them to stop her rocking and crying. They call it 'depression' because she is definitely very sad, but the anti depressants won't help.

And maybe she does get signed off sick, because the CMHT are genuinely lovely people who want to do their best. Maybe that's not exactly right in that with the right support she probably could work. But that support isn't there and cutting her benefits won't make it come into place.

And if you want to reduce the number of people being signed off sick with depression and anxiety, Wes, there are things you could do. You could demand that employers maybe do a better job at supporting their staff. You could invest in NHS services in order to address the physical issues - mobility issues/pain issues etc which are leading to mental health issues. You could provide better housing benefit (or the housing element of UC) or cheaper but reliable childcare. You could create more jobs, better public transport, loads of things, which I get you probably can't right now because our economy sucks.

But what you can't do is solve it by making anxious and miserable people even more anxious and miserable.

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Right vs Courtesy

2025-03-10T09:25:22Z

A thing I've said before and said again whenever I encounter this happening amongst online leftists.

1) Every marginalized group contains some terrible people, and even more people who are just flat out kind of irritating. Oh, and every marginalized group also contains a significant number of individuals who are someone's 'narc ex' or a flat out violent abuser. No group is immune from being just utterly horrible.

2) These people still get to not have their identity used against them. So, Caitlin Jenner may be annoying, but dead naming her is shitty. Kemi Badenoch is a terrible person, but sexist and racist insults are still not OK. Gal Gadot may have problematic views, but insisting on using the European sounding surname that her parents Hebraized before she was born in order to make sly insinuations is (IMO) kind of anti-Semitic. Especially when she's actually the seventh generation of her family born in Israel. It's a bit like slagging off Prince Charles for being German, and kind of becomes just obnoxiously anti-immigration at some point.

3) If you think a 'right' is only applicable if someone is a nice person, then it's not a right. It's just a courtesy.

Thank you for letting me share my ongoing vexation on a Monday morning. I'll go back to talking about LRP and cats soon.

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[Things I Have Read]

2025-02-26T00:06:33Z

So, today I'm reading Sophie Lewis, who is...

....I'm not sure who she is. She's some kind of philosopher and academic? She was raised in the UK but now lives in America and describes herself as a radical and I think sometimes as a Marxist and I think anyone who knows anything about her quit Facebook months ago. But she writes books which are both sincere, as far as I can tell, and also sometimes read a bit like a parody of far left radicalism as quoted by angry Tories on X/Twitter.

Her most recent book is 'Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation' which I shall read in due course. I have not yet because the reviews for it reminded me of the existence of her earlier books on family abolition, which I read while still working at the family therapy place, and which I detested at the time. And I decided to go back and try and re-read and figure out whether I was just having a knee jerk negative reaction, and feeling threatened and not thinking or something.

Anyway, I re-read the family abolition stuff, including 'full surrogacy now' and...( Read more... )

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A Thing Wot Someone Sent Me.

2025-02-11T11:09:46Z

And it sparked complicated and contradictory thoughts.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

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Political thoughts

2025-01-22T15:31:09Z

On Trump and his executive orders...

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Things I Have Watched

2025-01-22T10:49:49Z

The Time Traveller's Wife. I am watching the Theo James/Rose Leslie mini series version of this in what is increasingly a state of fixed horror where I feel I must see this through, despite the nausea in my belly.
I'm just gonna say it. Adding a gentle veneer of soft sci fi with the time travel thing does not take away from the essential awfulness of a plot in which a 7 year old girl meets an adult man and is groomed to be his perfect wife for her entire life. It is not romantic. It is never romantic. And all the scenes with 30-something Theo James (who is a very attractive and charismatic actor, doing his best with the horror that he is being given) playing board games with his tiny child future wife just reinforce the essential wrongness of the whole story.

There's another plot going on too about how he sees his future death and is haunted by his mother's death but it's frankly overshadowed by the deeply creepy child bride plot. I will see it through to the end. And then I shall add this show to Twilight as 'troubling narratives around children and romance that somehow still exist in this world'.

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Uglies.

It is a film. On Netflix. I know it is a film because it has moving pictures on a screen and actors who say stuff. This makes it a film.

Things it does not have:

A plausible premise
Realistic world building
Convincing characters
A compelling narrative

Extra note - if your entire plot is '16 year olds are taken away and given massive amounts of surgery to make them beautiful but a few rebels run into the woods to live free and ugly' then you might want to maybe cast your super attractive actors as the 'pretties' and the plainer ones as the 'uglies' and not the other way round.

Also, the massive surgeries you're doing that kills people and leaves lesions on the brains seems to only actually provide the pretties with a blonde dye job, contact lenses, and a lot of bronzer/foundation/shonky contouring. Well, except for Laverne Cox who is kind of genius casting as the chief baddie as she's both very attractive, but obviously has had a bunch of plastic surgery and so has a very 'created' look.
Finally, the 'rustic forest encampment' where the rebels live is clearly beautiful modern architecture. No one built that with their hands. It's super swish. They also get fancy Boden style clothing as to the weird cheap polyester futuristic clothing via Temu that the Pretties get. I feel like what you're actually secretly setting up is a dichotomy between 'rural old money' and 'trashy working class club kids' and I don't think that's what you meant to do.

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1899.

Better on a re watch.

My rage at Netflix for denying me my basic human right to a second series of this show has not abated.

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The Crow Girl.

Why is Wales now the 'go to' for gritty cop dramas? I don't know when this happened but this is the third I've recently seen.

I mean, I'm not objecting. All have been quite good shows. It's just an unexpected trend.

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London

2025-01-10T14:19:07Z

There are many things I don't miss about living in London. But I do miss the Thames. I always lived within easy walking distance of the river and whenever I'm back for work I always take a brief potter if I can to say hello.

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How to half arse your life

2025-01-10T14:17:42Z

Please read this article. Well, do or don't. I'm not the boss of you. But this woman who writes in praise of half arsing as much as you can basically speaks my total spiritual truth and also, I kind of love the idea of time share veganism.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/09/how-to-be-a-half-arse-human-you-probably-arent-going-to-have-clean-knickers-all-the-time?fbclid=IwY2xjawHuCz5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHVM59z4eZVrjr7uRCiceVo80Dbpy8-HhA2NZoZIHIgHRFHa88CvK4yMNeg_aem_B6L5XtUmVW_ca2ADrX_fSg

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A pretty thing

2025-01-10T13:51:54Z

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An experiment

2025-01-08T10:56:46Z

Right. In the faint hopes that maybe Dreamwidth may come into use, with a threatened exodus from FB, I'm going to try cross posting here, instead of just using dreamwidth as a space to post tat fic that I want to link people to.

We'll see how this goes. First post cross posted from FB.

Since people seem to be making announcements re: FB and meta, and I have never turned down an opportunity to make announcements on the internet yet.

I shan't be leaving FB as it's where the events are kept for me to manage my calendar. If more people were on Dreamwidth I'd post there more as it's by far my favourite site. It's just a bit sad posting to empty air. Tumblr is fun but everything there is public (I think) so I tend to keep it fairly shallow/surface level.
I think Bluesky is probably ultimately doomed to evil as 'short and snappy' inevitably seems to go that way and I also can't post in short form without either being stupid ("light is a gas") or really banal ("I like toast"). Discord is insanely bad for me because it's an endlessly scrolling wall of text that I either get lost in or can't ever look away from.

I have a vague fondness for forums, in a very old skool way too, but am erratic and forget they exist at times.

God, maybe at this rate I'll have to start talking to people in person like it's 1992.

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Random No Rest tat fic + poem using the last line of Rhapsody on a Windy Night

2024-02-23T20:50:36Z

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Should auld acquaintance be forgot....

2023-01-11T10:46:01Z

Random dream last night. Not one of my cinematic story dreams. Rather I revisited a long walk around Edinburgh I had with someone I knew up there and lost touch with years ago.

Woke up remembering how much I'd liked them. I think we did stay in touch via email at some point but I don't know if we were friends on FB and they blocked me or something, or if they left FB or were never on FB. I don't think I even have their email address now. So I think I probably can't get back in touch, and they would think me a bit mad if I tried, I suspect.

But...eh. Maybe the nice takeaway from this is that if I'm randomly waking up one morning, thinking kindly about someone I haven't spoken to in over 15 years, maybe someone else out there just woke up thinking kindly about me and wondering 'what happened to Sally? She was cool'.

(I mean, probably not. No one wonders what happened to me. I write it all on social media if I can. I am not a figure of mystery)

But maybe. Maybe all of us are the random subject of someone's weird out of the blue dream, where we walk down cobbled alleys and side streets, talking about nothing and everything.

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More random Narnian fanfic - Diggory Kirke's funeral, after the train crash

2021-10-27T16:07:07Z

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Random Narnia fanfic - the last day in Narnia.

2021-10-27T10:37:58Z

( All the complicated adult things of an adult life, all in motion and about to be torn away. The tragedy of the end of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe )

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The Dressing Room

2021-06-01T12:38:01Z

( Nonsense fic about the metaphorical dressing room in my imagination where characters live when not being played )

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Fading Suns fic for my TT game #4 - Tales of the Questing Knights: Felicia Alecto

2020-10-01T08:19:51Z

A poem

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Fading Suns fic for my TT game #3 - Tales of the Questing Knights: Tsurako Li Halan

2020-10-01T08:17:39Z

( So my husband runs a Fading Suns game, and as part of a project for that he is getting people to write a bit of fic in the style of a propaganda piece about the Emperor's questing knights. Because I'm bored, I've splurged on this. This is #3 with a poem to follow )

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Fading Suns fic for my TT game #2 - Tales of the Questing Knights: Drekolya Romanov Decados

2020-10-01T08:15:29Z

Fading Suns fic for my TT game #1 - Tales of the Questing Knights: Estelle Hawkwood

2020-10-01T08:05:16Z

How mental health services work in the UK (a non-expert account)

2020-01-14T10:21:03Z

I've seen a few less than happy social media posts over the last couple of months from people who have felt let down by the NHS and the support that is available for those with MH difficulties. In a couple of cases I kind of got the impression that some of the upset was caused by the NHS not being able to offer a level of support which, in my experience, doesn't exist. I mean, maybe it does in America. Maybe it does if you have lots of money and can go private. I'm not sure. But it's not something I've seen in the UK in a number of years navigating the NHS mental health provision. I also know that sometimes the NHS is not exactly clear or open as to how to get access to the help it DOES offer (there is a story here about how I wound up in hospital one time as a result of this) and that can be very frustrating.

So I thought I'd write a blog post aimed at providing a bit more information on psychiatry, NHS MH services, third sector additional support services and how to navigate the system. I add this disclaimer - this is based on my experiences as a patient in the NHS in three different regions, as an administrator in a psychotherapy centre in London, and as a fundraiser in a couple of care charities in Scotland. It's not exhaustive, I don't know loads of things and if anyone has any corrections they can make, I beg that they do.

This is just me writing down some facts which I thought might be useful in giving people new to the NHS MH services a realistic view on what they can and should expect, and how to get it.

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A snarky post on mental health in popular fiction

2019-08-20T08:44:43Z

[Inspired by depictions of the psychiatric hospital estate in modern urban fantasy and popular fiction. A true and accurate depiction of life when you are a tormented waif in an asylum, pursued by demons and John Constantine. Research carried out by me at the Maudsley and Gartnavel Hospitals over the last six or seven years. Any bitterness all my own. At least that’s genre appropriate, right?]

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Money management

2019-07-22T10:16:40Z

So, I made an offer on someone’s facebook to share some of my experiences of trying to manage money while being, frankly, appalling with the stuff. I have shit impulse control, I can’t count properly due to dyscalculia, I have hypomanic spending sprees and I also get easily distracted and forget about stuff I’m meant to do.

I’m a total financial disaster area.

I have, however, spent a fair bit of time trying to get myself down to ‘financially incompetent’ as opposed ‘horror show’. I’ll never be up there on moneysavingexpert.com, but I have gone from ‘my bank account has its own scorched earth policy’ to ‘I have savings sometimes, for short periods of time’. I’ve not bounced a direct debit in over five years, or gone into unauthorized overdraft and I finished last month with £50 spare in my account until payday.

Yes, I was still in my overdraft at that point. Shush.

So what I’m saying is that I’m not offering expert advice on how to be really good at this stuff. I’m offering a crazy person’s guide to being functional. Basically, How To Fake It Until You Make It (the money edition)

This process, by the way, is based on three principles which I use relentlessly.

1) If it’s automated, you can’t screw up by forgetting about it.
2) Big things are hard to focus on. Small things can be devoured.
3) Use your powers of distraction for good.

So, let’s start.

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Neurodiversity vs Mental illness

2019-04-01T10:49:06Z

So, for various reasons, I’ve decided to post here about MH stuff instead of FB and make FB a more impersonal place/more of a conversation about non-touchy things as I’m not convinced most people want to have my deep and meaningful thoughts thrust on them via FB.

And I’m putting up a bunch of stuff about the neurodivergent model vs mental illness model discussion because it sort of happened on FB today and I think went to a maybe not ideal place and so I took the post down there.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/abcs-child-psychiatry/201510/is-autism-mental-illness?fbclid=IwAR3PTVkVT3f1hUM_Gm6d9jTEx5JRIswnYD0p9KzTJ6FFURIUp0GauUDTKhs

This is the link I started with. I found it because I’d been reading around to try and deal with some of my feelings of discomfort around the whole ‘I’m not unwell, I’m neurodivergent’ conversation. And having now had more of a conversation with some proponents of it, I think I now feel even worse about the subject, and it’s thrown up a bunch of really uncomfortable thoughts about who I am, why I am, and how I feel about my own brain.

The basic summary, as given to me, is that the neurodivergent model says:

“People who are bipolar would generally have better lives if nobody was bipolar. People who are autistic would generally have better lives if everybody was autistic.”

I’m trying hard to not comment too much on the latter part of that although I’m always reminded of the Slatestarcodex article on this - https://slatestarcodex.com/.../against-against-autism-cures/ - which offers both a counter and also sparks an interesting comment on a problematic dynamic in activism where the highest functioning within a specific group often become very dominant voices within the conversation whilst maybe not entirely getting some of the issues others have. Certainly, it’s a reason I’ve stepped back from many many conversations about MH and disability because I’m painfully aware that I am incredibly lucky and don’t have a lot of issues other have and I feel as a result maybe shouldn’t be commenting on what you can or can’t do with a MH condition. But that’s an aside.

But I am feeling weirdly angry and defensive over the ‘bipolar people would have better lives if nobody was bipolar’. I don’t know why, but I really am, and I feel like it is an accurate summary and also a summary that to me feels like ‘it would be nice if people like Sally didn’t exist’. And so I’m trying to break it down.

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2018 TV review!

2018-12-17T11:14:57Z

So, I’ve realized it’s December, which means it’s time for my TV review of the year. As is Tradition, I offer you my normal format of the good, the bad and the ugly.

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This is me

2018-11-30T11:32:44Z

CW – gender, performative femininity, stuff that might be triggering from trans women, cis woman angst about gender, self pity, an essay as long as war and peace

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