6 thoughts on “Topsy and Tim”

  1. ‘The Guardian’ online is reporting on a survey of people’s experience of mental health care. There are stories of people who have waited so long for ‘care’ that they have become homeless, bankrupt and destitute. Many people have of course died but The Guardian hasn’t been able to interview them. One man waited 13 years for treatment. 13 years. Where was he from? North Wales. When he finally got the treatment he found it profoundly unhelpful.

    So why, for years, have we heard about nothing but ‘excellence’, ‘award winners’, ‘access to talking treatments’and recommendations to ‘talk to your GP’ if you are feeling suicidal? Has someone perhaps been telling porkies?

    13 years. Peter? Ruth? Mark? Can you explain?

    The people running these ‘services’ in Wales have been given OBEs, MBEs and CBEs. In England they’ve bagged knighthoods and peerages. The patients are destitute and dead.

    The general public have been told lies. While people hurled abuse at people like me and other Empowered Service Users in north Wales who were screaming as loudly as we could that something terrible was happening, every UK media outlet pumped out the lies. 13 years. That man was trying to top himself and begging for help 13 years ago. When everyone was
    reassured that there were no problems.

    The Guardian is also reporting that hundreds and hundreds of homeless people are dying on the streets. Most people living on the streets have at some point passed through the hands of the mental health services. This is not new. When I first went to London I lived in Harringay and it was explained to me that just down the road at Finsbury Park, every morning in the winter the police would go round and pick up the bodies of the dead tramps. I was gobsmacked. Me being gobsmacked was interpreted by everyone as being the sign of a bumpkin who had only ever lived in Somerset and north Wales. You let tramps die, everyone knows that. You watch them die and then you pick up their bodies.

    When I worked at St George’s Hospital, there used to be a row of people sitting outside Tooting Broadway tube station begging for money. One was a double amputee. I was told in the tea room at work that they were Springfield patients and ‘we’ve been told not to give them money, because they get money and they waste it’. Having already experienced Denbigh, Dafydd etc by then, I told the secretary who made this remark that the Angels probably stole their money. Every person in the room looked at me as though I was a turd. I hadn’t even said ‘the staff in Springfield are running a sex trafficking ring’ because I didn’t know that then.

    People might be surprised to learn that I have never ignored people who appear to be dying in the street. This is not because I am a bumpkin and it is not because I am naive. It is because I think that ignoring people dying in the street is wrong. Because I consistently took this view and then found out that the highly paid people managing the ‘services’
    which ‘looked after’ the people dying in the street were involved in criminality, I was forced out of virtually every job that I ever landed.

    The BBC is reporting that Welsh Councils are stumped because they don’t have enough money to run the basics, even now that they’ve closed down every service that they possibly can. They haven’t got any money because virtually the whole of the Welsh Gov’t budget has been given to the NHS.

    What are you all going to do now?

    Every candidate standing to be the next FM for Wales is standing on a policy of More Money For Top Doctors. The Baroness of Ely is married to a Top Doctor. Drakeford just does whatever they tell him to do. Gething is a lawyer who formerly worked for a firm which specialised in representing NHS staff who had abused their positions.

    A 13 year waiting list. No money for any services. People dying on the street.

    Ah, the doctors they were wonderful!

    1. Just read a piece about the history of the Soroptimists in Chester/north Wales. In Lucille’s heyday, they were already networked right across the UK and to ‘friendship’ groups in Europe. Many Soroptimists were Lady Doctors and teachers. They linked up with the Abbeyfield Society, an organisation ‘helping’ older people. Wherever there was a vulnerable person there was Lucille and her mates.

      The President of the Soroptimists on a national basis when Lucille and her gangsters were running it in the north west of England was Jane Barrie. Jane Barrie is still alive and kicking – in Somerset no less!

      Jane Barrie OBE DL is Chairman of Somerset Community Foundation, which ‘inspires philanthropy’ in Somerse:

      ‘Jane has lived in Somerset for most of her life and is the Chair of Health Education South West. She has had several Non-Executive roles within the NHS during the last 24 years, including Chair of NHS Somerset and Chair of Dorset and Somerset Strategic Health Authority. She is a stockbroker by profession and formerly Regional Director of NatWest Stockbrokers. With a keen interest in education, she is Chairman of Governors of Taunton School, and the former Chairman of the Learning and Skills Council for Somerset. She is a past President of Soroptimist International of Great Britain and Ireland, the global women’s organization whose members work to improve the lives of women and girls through programs leading to social and economic empowerment. She is a Patron of St Margaret’s Somerset Hospice and President of Care Focus (South West) CIC.’

      St Margaret’s Hospice has been the centre of a scandal recently…

      Does Jane perhaps know anything about my friend’s baby who died in Musgrove Park Hospital when she should not have or the appalling treatment that my father received at various times from the Somerset NHS before he died?

      Healthcare: a very deep trough for unscrupulous professional people Who Help.

      Dafydd, Lucille and their pals: all involved with vulnerable young people, drugs/pharmaceuticals and vulnerable but wealthy older people. There’s a pattern isn’t there.

      This lot ran and continue to run the NHS…

      1. Christ it gets worse.

        Jane Barrie was Chair of Dorset and Somerset Strategic Health Authority, 2002-06; Chairman of Somerset NHS, 2006-13.

        Barrie is an Imperial College chemistry graduate! Prior to that, she attended Bishop Fox’s Grammar School, Taunton.

        Bishop Fox’s was a school much desired by the middle classes of Somerset, particularly when the schools went comprehensive. Bishop Fox’s retained status and it was alleged standards and parents fought to get their girls in there. Auberon Waugh sent his daughters to Bishop Fox’s.

        Jane Barrie continued her involvement with Bishop Fox’s for decades.

        Brown’s mum used to teach at Bishop Fox’s. Brown’s mum who was found unexpectedly dead just after I finished my PhD, when Brown and me began writing about the mental health services. Brown’s mum who’s house was fitted with the emergency buzzer which she could use to raise the alarm if she needed to – the emergency buzzer that wasn’t being answered by the people who were paid to answer it…

        Somerset is run by Tories with a very different avowed political philosophy to Lucille and the gang in north Wales. But they all behave in a similarly unscrupulous way and they all know each other…

        1. I should remind readers that another mate of Dafydd’s who ended up in the West Country was Adam Peat. Peat was the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales who refused to investigate my case some 11 years ago after I presented him with documentary evidence of serious crime in the NHS in north Wales. Adam told me that it would not be in the public interest to investigate. Before Adam told me that by letter, Adam’s side-kick Geraint was incredibly rude and aggressive to me over the phone and basically told me to piss off out of it.

          Before Adam Peat was Public Services Ombudsman, he was a civil servant in the Welsh Office and in the Welsh Assembly, while they all concealed the rot.

          Adam retired in I think 2010. But he didn’t retire. Adam became Chairman of Magna Housing, a huge housing association serving Somerset and Dorset and other parts of the West Country.

          See previous posts for more info re Adam.

          Does Jane Barrie know Adam I wonder, what with Jane being in Lucille’s network?

          Jane Barrie might know what is going on at a few FE Colleges in Somerset as well. I have been told that the new Principal of Bridgwater College is on a huge salary – over £200k pa – yet he has put all the staff on short-term contracts. There is much upset. There are problems at Weston College too. A truly dreadful senior member of staff in the Student Counselling Service I understand. Bullying staff out of their jobs, pursuing a tick box mentality which is feared to be putting students’ welfare at risk but Natasha doesn’t care as long as her back is covered. There is at least one person who believes that Natasha is such a liability re vulnerable students that they are considering reporting her to her professional body.

          Jane Barrie needs to know that the problems in the school/FE counselling service in Somerset matter. Because the mental health services in Somerset have collapsed haven’t they Jane? Suicidal kids not being able to get referred to the CAMHS because they haven’t actually tried to kill themselves yet…One boy sat on a bridge and thought about throwing himself off, but when his school counsellor tried to get a referral for him, she was told that he wasn’t a priority…

          Meanwhile the ‘You and Yours’ phone-in on mental health on Radio 4 at lunch time did what I thought that it would. It accepted calls from a whole series of people who had great trouble getting ‘care’, but when they did it was usually great.

          There were two dissenters. A man called Tony who described being in a terrible state but not getting anywhere with the services despite begging for help. He finally found his own way through after coming across advice on mineral supplements. It doesn’t work for everyone but it did for him. It transpired that Tony had spent 20 YEARS knocking at the door of the mental health services, fruitlessly. He made a poignant observation; that he would sit in Top Docs surgeries crying helplessly because he was suicidal, only to be asked by the Top Doc ‘would you like to talk to someone?’ Because the Top Doc wasn’t going to help were they.

          This is what went on in north Wales for years. Desperate, desperate people whom anyone with half a brain could see were in great danger of suicide, being pissed about repeatedly and asked if they’d like to talk to someone. While they were sitting in front of the person whom they had been told that they could ‘talk to’. This would go on for months. The person would then be found dead. People who never witnessed it would never believe the extent of the fuckwittery.

          The other dissenter on ‘You and Yours’ was a lady who was the mother of a young man who had experienced a major psychotic breakdown. After repeated bad experiences with the mental health services, her son went quietly mad by himself and told his mum that he didn’t want anything to do with them. His condition got worse and in the end his mum, who did sound as though she was quite together, contacted the mental health services, told them that he was now in a terrible way, had lost all trust in them and had retreated from the world and was only speaking to her. She asked them to tread very carefully and be very sensitive and if he did turn up not to say that they had spoken to her because he was now so anxious and distressed. He did get another appointment. They opened the conversation with ‘you mother has referred you to us’.

          The young man walked out, went home and had a huge row with his mum, accusing her of being in league. All trust broke down, he left home and the last she heard he was sleeping rough in London and had become involved with drugs. He is too ill to get it together to claim benefits, so she is putting money in his bank account for him. His mum began giving the Radio 4 journo a very sharp analysis of the gross failures of all of the agencies involved. She was cut off. They had to go to another phone call. From a GP. Who told everyone how much GPs want to help. And that there is more money than ever before going into mental health services.

          So I suggest that someone now gets their arse in gear and accesses the figures for this money going into the mental health services and explains where the billions are hiding. Because the patients are definitely not seeing any of it.

  2. Just had another quick look at the website of the Somerset Community Foundation. The Patron is Lady Elizabeth Gass. I remember Lady Gass, she was a mathematician from Oxford who went back to run the family estate, Fairfield, at Stogursey. Brown’s mum lived in one of Lady Gass’s cottages. It was the cottage in which Brown’s mum was found dead, fitted with the alarm which was not being answered.

    Lady Gass is a Tory but she was quite popular in Stogursey because she rented out her cottages for years at very low rents. However I was told a few months ago that Lady Gass is alleged to have made an absolute bloody fortune by selling her land for the new Hinckley Point development. Which Ian Liddell-Grainger, the Tory MP for Bridgwater, is famously desperately in favour of, although many of his constituents have major reservations…

    If I was Lady Gass, I’d cut my links with the Somerset Community Foundation asap. Being involved with a mate of Lucille Hughes’s is not a good idea…

  3. Forgot to mention that the ‘You and Yours’ programme told the listeners about a Summit on mental health which is taking place today. All the Movers and Shakers are attending. Including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

    I look forward to the very same discussions and phone-ins being held re the Problems of the Mental Health Services in five years time. Because those at the Summit will never, ever admit what the problem is: criminal behaviour on the part of those who run and staff the mental health services. No-one, no-one at all can spit it out. Because if they did they wouldn’t be invited to Summits or to sit on Boards.

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