Pathways To Inclusion

A few months ago everyone around me who was working with vulnerable young people seemed to be gearing up for a mental health crisis. Floods of referrals would be needed, and who was set up for online consultations? Home visits? Who’s in charge of the trauma recovery programme? Now, from where I’m standing, it feels as if the crisis we were expecting never, really... happened. Or at least hasn’t happened yet. Why? Landscape #5 by Fabienne Monestier 15 years ago, on the day of the 7/7 bombings, I was working in a large hospital a couple of miles away from Tavistock Square. Please, don’t clap for me. I was an accounts administrator in the private outpatient wing. Anyway, my lasting memory of this day is of all these consultants tearing away from their private consultations, donning scrubs (it was the first and last time I ever saw them wearing scrubs) and milling around near A&E. Ready and, heroically, waiting. For patients that never arrived. The number of people injured turned out t...

Stay safe. I found it strange at first when this became our new sign-off. Shouldn’t it be 'keep well'? Or 'stay healthy'? But no, it's our safety that appears to be under threat. An intruder has broken in, past the defences we naively thought might have protected us. Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to reflect on how losing our safety net might help us better understand those who've never had one. The Fountain by Juliano Kaglis After my wife and I were burgled a few years ago, the thing we lost that hurt the most was not any of the possessions that were taken, but the underlying feeling that our front door marked the point at which outsiders could not enter. It has since taken time (and some heavy duty locks) to rebuild this psychological sense of security, for that is what we needed to do. We as humans need to kid ourselves every day into thinking that the walls around us will keep out any potential dangers, just so that we can go on...

"Exclusion and seclusion can echo relational trauma and systemic trauma; physical restraint can echo physical and sexual abuse. Retraumatisation... may drive even more challenging behaviour." (Centre for Mental Health: Briefing 54) Trapped by Ashley Huisman A number of cases recently have seen mothers taking, or threatening to take their child's school to court for the seemingly barbaric systems of internal exclusion that are in use. Mothers of children with ADHD, with ASD, with mental health difficulties, with family trauma. The mother of a son who spent a third of his school year in ‘isolation’. The mother of a daughter who attempted suicide while she was in an isolation booth. I'm glad that it’s been widely reported on the BBC and even made the front page of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago; we downplay cases like this at our peril. There is now an active ‘ ban the booths ’ campaign group, and the first ‘ lose the booths ’ conference took place in L...