“Student Mental Health ‘failing a generation'”
[BBC TV Text News today Saturday 12 May 2018]
“British universities say they risk “failing a generation” unless students get better mental health care.
A Universities-UK report found some students risk “slipping through gaps” due to lack of coordination between the NHS and universities.*-
The most up-to-date statistics show 146 students killed themselves in 2016. At Bristol, three students have died suddenly in the past month alone.
An NHS official said local services should collaborate with universities.“.
The double-problem there is that
both
the Universities
and
the NHS
fall “hellishly” short of
Fitness-for-Longest-Term
Sustainworthy-&-Sustainworthying
Human-&-Earthlife Purpose.
———————-
THE UNIVERSITIES :-
A few failures need to be floodlighted,
first the outstandingly-hugely-malfeasant and dishonest deliberate-failure
Increasingly-blinkering specialisation-foci for the 40 hr to/week Career-&-Job Workplace
to the Exclusion of
both
Enablements for the 128 hrs/week Lifeplace
and
Great numbers and ranges
of clearly and affordably-published
top-professional and life-experienced advances
in Human Knowledge,
Human-Development Know-How,
Self-&-Civilisation Co-Sustainworthying-and-Movement
and
Non-Medical Holistic Health Building.
———————
In Plymouth 2001,
long after a nervous-breakdown as a student at Keele university 1954
where I had been “sent” to a “modernised psychiatric-clinic for a “rest”
but instead was within one or two minutes given a wrong psychiatric-diagnosis,
in the presence of the senior professor [who was supposed to be my “advocate and guardian” ]
and ensuingly locked-away and held-down
(although on the advice of the university I had entered ‘voluntarily’
and was neither self-harming nor violent)
for injuriously-wrong medical and psychiatric treatment.
In 2001 the MIND staff and committee found me to be
“the first survivor of psychiatry who is helpfully-experienced and still mindfully coherent —
please join our Management Committee”; which naturally (and again trustingly) I did.
I was asked to attend a Medical Professor’s book-launch (on “Alternative Therapies”) at Plymouth university one evening.
I had already begun trying to do my own chosen research using the Seale Hayne Library in Plymouth University,
and had become somewhat concerned
that many published advances in Holistic Health [not Illness nor “unwellness”]
and in Individual Human Development [still incidentally “Cinderella’d” even by the United Nations and its WHO]
were nowhere to be found in that university, nor even on its catalogues.
So I took along to the lecture a small armful of such books that I had bought –
especially since discovering during my 30 years emigration working in Australia books such as
Natural Vision Improvement (Janet Goodrich)
Leader Effectiveness Training (Thomas Gordon)
Every-one Can Win (Cornelius & Faire)
Health Care Together (Johnston & Rifkin)
Your Body: biofeedback at its best without instruments, machinery and artificiality (Beata Jencks)
Lifestreams(David Boadella)
The Centering Book (Hendricks & Wills)
Awareness Through Movement (Moshe Feldenkrais
and
Wisdom of the Body Moving (Linda Hartley) –
even
Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono)
and
Logic: Theory and Practice(Girle, Halpern et al).
Simply glimpsing the spines of this armful of neglected books, the professor bluntly said
“We don’t keep such books because we don’t teach them”.
————
Back at MIND,
neither were the staff nor management committee in the slightest bit interested
not only in any of these neglected works
but not even in MIND’s own Quality Management Manual which lay gathering dust in a drawer in the staff office.
——————–
Back at the university library again,
I found it “study & research inhibiting”
that of the thousands of books and towering shelves of them that one has to work-through,
none had the date of publication on the outside spine,
instantly visible for the would-be fit-for-purpose student or researcher.
instead of having to climb a ladder, fetch the book down, find a table, and peer through the tiny print on the reverse of the inside title page
for that publication date.
————–
{NB please:- When I show Beata Jencks’s still leading detailed and ‘encyclopaedic work .
Your Body: biofeedback at its [natural] best
to quite sober and reasonably clear-minded people,
they invariably see the publication date (because I have inked it onto the outside cover)
and they push the book to one side
“That’s1985, that’s now out of date” they say –
“Things have moved on and changed since then”.
——————————————————————————
Universities also have hugely-budgeted “Sustainability” faculties –
none of which can comprehend “sustain-worthiness” – it simply is “not a word”
——————————————————
The NHS – National Health Service
( we have already published some detail
about that super-costly but “dog-in-the-manger” Britain’s biggest Employer –
which should long ago have had its title honestly-corrected to
“The British Illnesses, Pharmacological and Hospitals Sector”
and there should also long ago have been launched
“The United Kingdom Wholistic Health and Wellbeing Building Service”
quite separately from the Illnesses Sector –
more perhaps as a major part of a reformed
128-hours/week-Lifeplace
All-Round Education Sector.
————–
But the prevailingly-chronicly-ailing NHS has so many Unfitnesses-for-Purpose –
and they should long ago have adopted a 7-fold holistic human healthy living model, distinguishing as follows Our Needs:-
Physiological;
Emotional:
Mind-Functional [“Mental” has become so toxicly-foggy]
Environmental [Social is too narrow – and should,not be containing “Work” anyway]
Spiritual
“Sanctuary-Now” [‘No-fault time-out’]
and
Job requirements
should be quite separately listed