We often think that the NHS is there to help us with mental illness or even just mental distress but there are limits to the help that it can provide. My interest in the area of mental distress came from personal experience. I was struggling to cope with home family and marriage and wondering how
Relieving the pressure on the NHS
My recent adventures have left me with a greater appreciation of the need to relieve the pressure on the NHS. When I went home the ward I was on was closed to new admissions. They were so short staffed that if something went wrong then they could not have coped. They set things up so
How do we know what is good for people?
One way we can know what is good for people is to sit back and think about what helped us in the same situation. Or if that is not possible to get advice from someone who has been in that situation. One thing that sticks in my memory about this is a scene from a
How do you change people’s financial status for the better without weakening them?
Changing financial status for the better, what a convoluted term. The problem is finding a neutral term for something that can be very polarised. In fact it is this polarity that makes it such a hard thing to tackle. At one pole we have concepts like eradicating poverty or fighting poverty. These are attempts to
Why use weak in the tag line rather than poor?
Interesting? Why weak and not poor? The real answer is that this was God’s idea not mine. Or rather this is what I thought He told me to use. But why use weak rather than poor? One thing that strikes me is that poor has more of a connotation of disdain. You know the poor
Vanessa on Periscope
Have you investigated Periscope yet? It is one of the many ways that people are connecting with people on line. The idea is that if you have a phone with a video camera that can download an app for either an Android or an Apple phone you can record a video and leave it online
What do you mean by a fair society?
The idea of a fair society is, like many other terms, something that means something different to different people. Words can change meaning over time and can mean different things within different communities. One classic example is the word prevent. This at one time meant to go before. Today it means to stop something happening.
A meander around the issue of bias and being fair to others
Well we think we are thinking right but how do we know for sure? Some of us go through times when we are so influenced by those around us that we cannot think right. We have all heard the saying that bad company corrupts good morals. It takes a strong person to stand up for
Christians and money
Ever thought how much we need others to help us obtain everything we need. After all how many of us can grow all our own food? Do we know how to keep sheep, separate the sheep from its fleece, then use that fleece to make cloth and then use that cloth to make comfortable clothes?
The reality of the Proverbs 31 woman
The Proverbs 31 woman is one of the most annoying characters in the Bible. She is that mythical creature that normal women measure themselves by and find themselves wanting. How does any normal, sane, sensible woman reach those standards? When you look at where the advice comes from you soon realise the problem. The Proverbs