Suppose your country screwed every penny it could out of you, in taxes and stealth taxes.
Suppose it deliberately designed traps for you to fall in so it could fine you, e.g. HMRC tax returns, fines for parking in the ‘wrong’ place, 20mph zones, speed cameras, recycling bins etc.
Suppose your country ranked immigrants (legal and illegal) higher than it ranked you, put them first, granted those minorities rights, goodies, legal protections and status that were denied to you, as part of the host population?
Suppose it did not remove those rights, benefits and goodies from minorities after they were convicted of crimes? That it protected criminals and their rights above you, a working, law-abiding, taxpaying citizen?
Suppose it berated you at every opportunity about how racist, sexist, transist etc you are then prosecuted, charged, fined and imprisoned you for expressing your opinion about how your country had been flushed down the toilet?
Suppose that every year, the services you once received free were charged for while the quality and availability got worse?
I could go on, but you wouldn’t voluntarily go to war or send your sons to war for such a country, would you? Would you even lift a finger for them if you weren’t forced to? Because that country would have made it perfectly clear that you, a citizen, counted for precisely nothing to them, that you were an inconvenience, a nuisance, needed controlling, couldn’t be trusted, and had to be squeezed dry to pay for their special projects and personal wealth.
Gosh, it sounds a bit too much like being married, doesn’t it?
The parallels are stark between the state of affairs above and how the DoH, the numerous quangos and regulators and the NHS senior managers with their pompous job titles treat us, the real psychiatric professionals underneath them, the people currently delivering care and treatment to the patients and their families.
There’s another junior doctors strike going on as I write. On HYS messageboards you can read crap criticising them like —
‘Arm nurses with AI and ‘residents’ become redundant.’
‘Doctors are there to do a job. If they do it, they get paid. If they don’t, they get sacked and we get in someone else. Simple…Why should doctors be any different? State employees of any description are lazy parasites.’
Probably written by the unemployed from their mum’s spare bedroom or people working McJobs. (Or Chinese or Russian demoralisation bots). Doctors, nurses, teachers, police and prison officers, military officers, diversity officers and so on, are not the same as minimum wage Deliveroo drivers or hospital cleaners. Not even close. (Or Birmingham City Council female cleaners.) A country cannot function without us. That’s why the final outcome of making psychiatric nursing such a crap job that young people don’t even apply to train, is disastrous.
Britain has what’s been described as a mental health crisis blowing up underneath our feet, right now. It’s a poor, idle description, probably written by a reporter who doesn’t know the difference between mental illnesses, disorders and conditions, between neurosis and psychosis, between the worried well and the seriously and chronically mentally ill.
In another post I may try to tidy up what’s actually going on and to whom. But that’s not the point. This is.
– Britain has far, far more psychiatric need that we can diagnose and treat.
– Services cope by excluding all but the most serious cases.
– The lunatics are truly in charge of the asylums, well, the PDs and psychopaths more so than the mad patients.
– We can’t cope and aren’t coping. Management’s heads are buried deep in the sand.
Britain urgently needs a Secretary of State for Health who has a spine, a pair of balls, an Oxbridge-like-it-used-to-be brain and the skin of a rhino. Such a leader, and the people he appoints below him, could turn medicine and nursing back into such brilliant jobs, callings and careers which young people like the sound of, sign up for, train, stay and finally leave after forty years of improving themselves, leading and teaching others who came up behind them.
So that’s 4 posts on how it’s become a crap job. Next I’m going to tell you why they did it.
Leave a Reply