What he said

Read this first : Dumb Jon seems to have found a health issue that contradicts our faith in the expertise of the National Health Service – at least in Wakefield.

Gruesome, isn’t it?

But - and here’s the funny thing - if you read the NHS website about this hospital, three out of four Amazon-style reviews are okayish about the staff/regimen of the place, though oddly it looks like more money needs to be spent on decorating it.

And, of course, it’s important to read what the hospital says about itself. Look at all those lovely scripts in the lower bar that tell us the conversations in the place are going to be enhanced by the presence of interpreters – just to add to the mental health fun.

And there’s a mental health self-help page here, (and please believe me when I write that I recognize mental illness is a terrible thing and is not merely a cop-out from personal responsibility for the lazy and the criminal and which needs careful and complex methods of treatment), but there’s a huge irony in the list of things recommended for mental health self-help:

# Look after yourself

* Get active

* Feed your mind

* Be included

* Get some fresh air

* Help to stop smoking

* Relax and unwind

Okay, so they passed on the ‘Go absent without leave and rape-murder a stranger’ bit, but still and all perhaps if the highly-trained staff spent just a tad more time or even money on diagnosing and assessing peoples’ present states of mental health rather than offering (admittedly very wholesome) Women’s’ Institute fresh air and exercise advice, then the outcome would have been different.

‘Different,’ as in so many encounters with a bloated and overstretched State, translates as ‘no dead innocent this time.’

Oh, and back to Jon’s post; see how he manfully refrains from a side issue which a lesser writer such as I might have jumped upon, and which I feel I ought to raise just purely as an aside and nothing else. It’s about the BBC article that covers this unfortunate event.

"Police said that 52-year-old Passwala, who is originally from Bradford,"

Just a thought, and a propos nothing at all, does anyone think that the BBC has done its fact-checking properly here?

Only...and call me superstitious or something, I think that he might not really be originally from Bradford as such. I just can't think, if so, why the BBC hasn’t got this bit right. It's not like extreme sexual screwed-upness is different from anything else in human life, is it? Extreme sexual screwed-upness is the product of socially-constructed norms. Ask a liberal anywhere.

I’d just like to know which social norms this chap might have learned at his mother's knee – you know, about how to treat women, who decides on their fate, what say they should have in deciding the content and the personnel involved in their sex lives.