UK 21 June 2018 | 3-hour ME debate in Westminster Hall, secured by Carol Monaghan

Removing the stigma of "mental health" is a current government sound bite.

It sounds nice and progressive but it means that the government who charge a bedroom tax on the poor and disabled, tell people they are fit to work who drop dead a week later, cut disability benefit off using ATOS, removed the minimum income safety threshold for people on benefits, sanction disabled people and others on benefits so they cant feed themselves and have to go to food banks,.......


WANTS TO DECLARE MORE PEOPLE MENTALITY ILL.

Who will they use to market this "destigmatising of mental illness". Psychiatry who think everyone is mentally ill and don't even know how to define it?

Our societies really need to wake the hell up and take part in what they want the definition of "mentally ill" to be and not just sleep walk into this dystopian nightmare wherby the government has a massive PR campaign running on things like IAPT and "destigmatising" mental illness.

Are we going to end up with a version of John Prescotts "we are all middle class now", that proclaims "we are all mentally ill now", wherby psychiatry sits by and claims to be the only ones who are of sound mind and capable of understanding things?

 

I think it's also going to be shown on BBC Parliament on Monday 25th June, and then it will be on iPlayer:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b8gxnn

 

Press coverage: Daily Star have covered it, but half of the article is about Ricky Gervais...

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/la...Gervais-Fame-ME-joke-MP-Steve-Brine-Apologise

 

I saw that on Twitter, and thought it was not the angle I was expecting to get picked up, but you know it might get people to look..

 

Personally I think Rickey Gervais is the last of our worries and I don't want to see a twitter storm that brings in the whole world to turn it all into an even bigger joke and sidetracks the amazing work that was done yesterday.

A Twitter storm could take this off to a whole other direction like a "what about freedom of speech" angle or even worse. Also we will get trolled the hell out of.

Ricky Gervais is just a comedian who made an ill informed joke about disabled people because of people in the BPS crowd who ill informed the whole of society.

 

Well that could have gone both ways but fortunately I think it went our way. Interesting to see the longer clip - Gervais doesn't look as bad in the longer clip as he is made to look in Unrest - he says he knows it's a physiological disease and not psychosomatic.

Possibly, I don't pretend to know. My first idea was that he was too lazy to do his homework so just watched the film, and demanding an apology from Gervais was an easy way to be seen to be on our side without actually having to do anything. It nearly went horribly wrong (reading the tone of the Daily Star at the beginning of the article) but fortunately turned out well. If he knew what he was doing it was a pretty risky move to make on our behalf.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1010105078718648321

 

I agree. There's nothing private between a Professor and an MP, unless they agreed on it being private or there's a contract.
Probably Sharpe meant "I trusted CM to keep it private". Which is naïve.

 

Ye, "I am going to insult you in a private correspondence but you are not allowed to tell anyone".

 

I noticed that - and was very pleased - and surprised - to briefly see my own Tory (Conservative) MP from North Cornwall (Scott Mann) - ask a question. He had previously said - or asked someone else to say - that he wasn't allowed to participate in such things due to his position.

 

I think that he changed it after being contacted by patients. There was a blog somewhere that included a reply Gervais had written to the blog author. tbh, his reply probably made him seem worse, although it was good he took the time to respond. [My memory of it was that he just really didn't understand the issues at all, and seemed to start with a misguided assumption that as his intentions weren't bad, it must be okay, and anyone who disagreed must be misunderstanding his sophisticated humour & comic persona].

LOL

"... and then claim that you took my comment unfairly out of context, but act like it's some how noble of me to not release the e-mail showing the full context".

 

That email is only private by Michael Sharpe's choice. If he wants to make it public, there's absolutely nothing stopping him.

 

Personally I think that criticising comedians for being 'offensive' can easily back-fire.

For people interested in the context though, Gervais' full 'fame' special is here, with the ME bit from 21:30-29:00:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFav9Pn7qjo

He moves on to talking about how you'd never have an African complaining of having ME, seemingly a reflection.

Here's a Jason paper on prevalence rates in Nigeria: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1359105307076233

 

Statement from @The UK ME/CFS Biobank Facebook page.

 

This was exactly my thought. I didn't say anything about him yesterday because I was afraid of stoking the fire.

I think the minister played this up intentionally to deflect attention as it would be more newsworthy, and seems to have worked.

Any thoughts on requesting anything from Rickey Gervais should be dismissed.
Could so easily backfire spectacularly.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1010177933183475714

 

ah yes, I remember doing the same with 'Jane Eyre' at school............the teacher commented that my answers to a test on what we were supposed to have read were very imaginative.

 

I actually think it's a cheek to even raise the Ricky gervsais thing and say he should give us an apology, it's irrelevant. It's not HIM I want an apology from or action from and then the minister proceeded to mainly defend the [[appalling]] status quo whilst jarringly quoting unrest as if he "really understood". Jessica in Bed for her birthdays, which he tied into home education, was nothing to do with education, in fact I very much doubt in most of those years Jessica could do any home learning it was the waste of life caused by there being no treatment, caused by no research.