TW DWP

The DWP has just published 'Work aspirations and
support needs of health and disability customers'. No time to depth read but a few points 🧵 tinyurl.com/yb3by8h5 The only risk the report acknowledges is financial.
DWP says claimants worry they might "lose benefits if they try working and struggle."

But it makes no mention of worsening health, relapse, hospitalisation, or suicidality.

This is quite extraordinary.

🧵 New NICE Guidelines out today on menopause

Good things:
✔️ HRT as the preferred treatment to help with depressive symptoms that don't meet criteria for a diagnosis of depression with recent onset
✔️ Don’t routinely offer SSRIs, SNRIs, or clonidine for vasomotor symptoms 1/3 Bad bits:
❌ Still over focus on vasomotor symptoms (such as night sweats and palpitations)
❌ Ignores the second spike in existing mental illness/neurodivergence agony during perimenopause (some evidence suggests oestrogen is protective and it goes)
❌ No mention of suicide risk

Starmer BBC today “Quite often I think what lies behind this is a fear for someone who’s been on long-term sickness, that: can they get back into the workplace? Are they going to be able to cope? Is it all going to go hopelessly wrong?” Note the psychologisation of disability 🧵 Here CBT ideology being used again to disability and resource deny. let me be clear-CBT can be a great therapy. But as a political ideology, it is dangerous repeatedly used to suggest mindset change with minimal intervention is the problem, justifying its use alongside sanctions.

🧵 I've just published a new article titled 'The Personality Disorder Shield.' It explores how clinicians sometimes unknowingly use a 'PD shield' to avoid addressing trauma, instead projecting their own emotional challenges onto patients. 😮#TraumaNotPD tinyurl.com/3ptdxc46 This article was for the in-house magazine of the British Psychoanalytic Council, so I’ve used psychoanalytic language to engage and hopefully persuade its audience of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists #TraumaNotPD! Below is the essence of the argument in tweets.

‘Concerns over the prescription of #clozapine for people diagnosed with “BPD” in private locked psychiatric units’ tinyurl.com/2p9akujp

Important. Clozapine is frequently thrown at people whose cases are seen as hopeless without a full range of interventions having been tried Many people are diagnosed with PD and left languishing for years in assessment and treatment units meant for a few month stay. I hear of clozapine, yes, bur also people kept in restraints all day.ALL DAY. Levels of abuse are high, families nearly always too far to visit regularly

To say my heart is with Black service users, esp those incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals which are terrifying at the best of time let alone now. If we even think of trauma-informed care, your voices have to be central alongside more funding for Black MH grassroots orgs 1/2 The history of mental health provision has so often been retraumaticing adding to the legacy of transgenerational structural racism - yet more institutional abuse in the form of traumagenic increased sectioning levels and overmedication not something healing.

There are no doubt some brill clinicians at #BIGSPD19 + more importantly service users bravely speaking out. But what appears to be missing is consideration of how the lack of services +care for the majority of patients that is lamented is produced by ideas of ‘BPD’ it promotes. Rather than have conferences for specific diagnoses,which exclude as many people as they include but make attendees feel like vanguards, we need whole workforce, trans-diagnostic commitment to depth help for those experiencing the kind of sphlintering anxiety that can wreck life.