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One prison officer earnestly warned me that the psychologists here were all deluded do-gooders. Oh, and lesbians.
Media reporting of crime and actual events so often seem to exist in different dimensions, entirely unconnected by truth or facts. Newspapers sell stories and stories get spun to suit their agenda. This episode had all the salacious elements of the perfect tabloid story – the prison officer and the redhead. Of course that was how this tale was going to play out in the tabloids.
In 2002, not long before Marcus came to the hospital, the Bennett Inquiry had been commissioned. It followed the death of David Bennett, an African-Caribbean man, who died after being restrained by staff at a medium- secure unit. The report found that black men were generally regarded by staff in psychiatric hospitals as ‘more aggressive, more alarming, more dangerous and more difficult to treat’ and that they tended to receive higher doses of medication than white people given similar diagnoses. It concluded that people from black and minority ethnic communities were six times more likely to
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Just a few years earlier, Conservative MP Peter Griffiths had won a local election in nearby Smethwick with the slogan ‘If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour’.
But for a lot of others, having their mental health problems described as ‘illnesses’ feels oppressive.
negates the fact that psychological distress, in whatever form it is exhibited/plays out, is frequently a plausible reaction to the slings and arrows that life throws at us.
Some diagnostic labels are easier to swallow than others. ‘Anxiety disorder’ or ‘depressive disorder’, for example, don’t tend to carry such negative associations in the public mind as ‘schizophrenia’.
someone experiencing phenomena such as hearing voices, or being convinced of things that others find bizarre, their psychological distress is often as much a result of facing people’s reactions to their experiences as of the experiences themselves.
short, mental distress is more likely a product of complex, overlapping personal and social factors than simply wonky brain chemistry or unfortunate genetics.
all depends on your unique way of looking at the world).
I have even known some offenders make gifts of their trophy items, covertly reasserting their dominance and control over a different person
The Home Office Homicide Index consistently shows that children under one year old have the highest rate of victimization or death by homicide per million population. That means that a person is more likely to meet a violent death in the first 12 months of life than at any other age. Almost always they are killed by a parent or step-parent.
The even less palatable truth is that in the majority of sexual assault and rape cases, whether adults or children are the target, the perpetrators are people who the victim knows: family members, partners, work colleagues or acquaintances.
The proportion of people with brain injuries estimated to be in the prison system at the moment is between 10 and 20 per cent.
While his brain damage explained his failure to think through the consequences of his behaviour – the hardware causing blips in the programmes it implements – I believe there were other things he could have done, many ideas that he might have acted upon that day, that didn’t involve sexually assaulting a child.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. Margaret Atwood
I have found that the further north of the country I go the less likely a client is to score highly on this. In fact, my favourite research study of all time investigated why Scottish criminals scored less on the PCL-R than their American counterparts. Investigators found it was because they lack the Americans’ glib, charming manners! American psychopaths tell you to ‘Have a nice day’, Scottish ones, not so much.)
Misogyny – an ingrained prejudice against and contempt for women and girls – is one of the few human conditions that hasn’t yet been declared a mental illness. Probably because, if it were, it would be a pandemic.
The National Crime Agency estimates there are up to 80,000 people in the UK who ‘present some kind of sexual threat’ to children online.
Who hasn’t acted foolishly – or at least conspicuously out of character – when in love?’ Who indeed.
The benefits to the psychologist of a therapeutic alliance are rarely discussed, but they do occasionally happen.
stay somewhere long enough and it can become a home, even a family.
order for someone to feel strong enough to move on, they need to be able to picture a better life for themselves, one that is achievable,
(Although, if we are honest, do any of us really fully embrace every aspect of ourselves?)
