Details

Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 22 September 2020

Hits: 2198

Photo:INDEPENDENT

UK has experienced 'explosion' in anxiety since 2008, study finds

‘Financial crash, austerity, Brexit, climate change and social media blamed for large rise’- Via The Guardian*

Why are we allowing all these to happen to us, young and old? This is my question 

Poverty, Destitution, Hunger and Homelessness in the Midst of Plenty

This is nothing, but a manifestation of a cruel and inhumane state of affairs

Lest We Forget:

A country/nation drunk on market values, guided by cruel machinery of exploitation, racism, class division, austerity, cruelty, aggression, that humiliates it’s innocent, weak and vulnerable citizens, with neoliberalism, poverty, inequality and food banks and celebrates extreme individualism, feral competition, worship of mammon, rat-race to a success that it can never deliver and ignores the struggles and plight of its children and youth, ceases to be civilised and sooner or later ceases to exist morally or spiritually.

The Shame of Poverty and Destitution in Britain Today

Photo:holyrood.com

Do you have an eye for justice and sense of duty? Then, these questions are for you.

‘There has been an “explosion” in anxiety in Britain over the past decade, research has shown, with the financial crash, austerity, Brexit, climate change and social media blamed for massive rises in the condition.

The debilitating mental illness has trebled among young adults, affecting 30% of women aged 18 to 24, and has increased across the board among men and women under 55.

The findings emerged in one of the biggest studies of anxiety undertaken in the UK for many years, examining trends in diagnosis and treatment by GPs since 1998 by analysing 6.6 million patients at 795 practices across the UK.

The blight on the conscience of the world: Why are so many youth and students killing and harming themselves?

Child Poverty UK: The Shaming of the British Elites 

Photo:bing.com

The analysis found that the country has experienced what lead researcher Prof Nick Freemantle called “a massive increase, a profound increase” in anxiety, which began in 2008 when the worldwide crash caused by bad bank loans triggered large-scale unemployment and financial insecurity.

“Given the steep increases in anxiety revealed by this research, and the sheer number of people affected, it is now clear that Britain has a really serious and worsening problem with anxiety, which can have devastating effects on people’s lives. And these data stopped just before the Covid-19 pandemic; we can only speculate on how they would look now.”

In 2008, 8.42% of women aged 18 to 24 suffered anxiety, the study found, more than trebling to 30.33% by 2018. The proportion of women aged 25 to 34 with anxiety more than doubled over that time, from 9.08% to 21.69%, while there were smaller increases among women aged 35 to 44 and 45 to 54.

The incidence of anxiety in young and middle-aged men followed the same trajectory, although fewer had been diagnosed when the study period started, a gender divide that has not narrowed. Generalised anxiety disorder trebled from 4.95% to 14.88% among men aged 18 to 24, more than doubled from 9.08% to 21.69% among those aged 25 to 34 and rose to a lesser degree among those aged between 35 and 54.

“Rates of anxiety crept up a bit from 1998. But suddenly there was this explosion in 2008 in both the absolute numbers and also in particular in women and especially young women. That’s when the increase went through the roof,” Freemantle told the Guardian.

“These findings illustrate the human cost of what was going on in society at the time – that is, a recession. The 2008 crash was characterised by unemployment, especially youth unemployment. Young people who were just starting out in adult life had the rug pulled out from under them.”

An Open Letter to University Leaders: Students’ Mental and Emotional Wellbeing Must Be Our Priority

Student Suicides at Bristol University: My Open Letter to the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Hugh Brady 

Asked to identify other factors that might help explain the big increase, Freemantle added: “During this period [2008-2018] we had a recession, a vote to leave Europe, which was not popular among young people, social media became ubiquitous, there was increased concern about the climate, and there was a change of attitude towards [people disclosing that they have] anxiety disorder.

Some of those events may well have “contributed to feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, coming as they did after years of financial insecurity”, added Freemantle, a professor of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics, and director of the Comprehensive Clinical Trials Unit at University College London.

He and his colleagues’ findings, which have been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, stated: “It is notable that rates of generalised anxiety disorders and symptoms began their current upward trajectory around the time of the effects of the 2008 economic downturn and during the policy of austerity.”

The surge was accompanied by a big rise during 2009-14 in sick days workers in England and Wales took off due to stress, depression and anxiety. Six in 10 (62%) of those with anxiety also had depression, they found.

But there is a clear generational divide when it comes to anxiety, which has not risen among those aged 55 and over. That is probably because they tend to be less affected by economic factors and uncertainties faced by young adults, such as in housing and job prospects, Freemantle said.

Andy Bell, deputy director of the Centre for Mental Health thinktank, said: “These are very significant findings. They really point up the need to understand the economic and social reasons why anxiety has been rising. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s all down to social media.

“Rates of common mental health difficulty are higher in more unequal countries and Britain has become more unequal since 2008.”

The Broken Economic Model and the Inhumanity of the Lost Decade of Austerity

‘Why is there so much inequality in the country?’: This is how to dream to build a better and fairer world

Neoliberalism and the rise in global loneliness, depression and suicide

Experts warned that the profound impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on people’s health, jobs and daily lives almost certainly meant anxiety had increased even further this year.

Brian Dow, deputy chief executive of the charity Rethink Mental Illness, said: “Uncertainty is a normal part of life, but the Covid-19 pandemic and its quartet of uncertainties – illness, isolation, unemployment and debt – are bound to put rocket fuel under the level of anxiety that many people feel.

“There is clearly a systemic problem in the growth of anxiety and depression amongst young people. If we are to reverse this trend and prevent a problem becoming a crisis, the social contract we provide to young people has to have a better set of terms and conditions.”

'This is not about politics, it's about humanity'

Kindness to Heal the World- Kindness to Make the World Great Again

“In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”

Why Happiness Should be Taught at Our Universities

Crisis after Crisis: Ten Steps to Save the World

Case study

When Sydney was in year 7 and 8 at school, messages she read on the social media site Ask.fm made her cry. “I don’t know why I got it,” Sydney said of the app, which let people ask questions without revealing their identity. “The amount of abuse I got on it, along with others, was horrible.”

This was the start of a long and complicated journey the 20-year-old has had over the years. Sites such as this one, as well as Instagram and Facebook, compounded anxiety experienced since childhood.

“I used social media a lot when I was younger… the girls who posted would be tiny and have long hair. They would be picture-perfect and seeing those images would be really hard as I did not look like that, so I was constantly comparing myself to them,” she said.

At its worst, Sydney’s anxiety manifests itself in panic attacks that leave her feeling as if she is going to die. Her hands start to sweat and she zones out. At one stage, anxiety left her too terrified to leave the house and struggling to speak to people.

A turning point came with getting good therapy from someone who showed they cared. This, as well as exercise and her dog, who forces her out even when she doesn’t want to go, have left Sydney feeling more stable.

Part of her journey back to health has also involved changing the way she uses social media and only following accounts that make her feel good.

“Society expects women to be a certain way and if you are not that way you are ‘not good enough’. It’s always been that way since I have been young. We should be doing certain things and acting certain ways, and that is shoved out on social media,” she said.

So what do young people need? “If you reach out to a GP, you get referred and put on a long waiting list,” she said. “I feel like there needs to be a lot more support ... and it would also help to get people going into schools.”

*This article by Denis Campbell, health policy editor for the Guardian and the Observer, was first published in The Guardian on 14 September 2020.

Below you can read the full report:

Trends in generalised anxiety disorders and symptoms in primary care: UK population-based cohort study April Slee, Irwin Nazareth, Nick Freemantle and Laura Horsfall

The Path to a Better and Healthier World

A GCGI Initiative: Examining mental health issues around the world, with a special focus on children, youth, students, their teachers and lecturers.

This new GCGI Initiative is dedicated to the youth of the world, our children and grand- children, who are the unfolding story of the decades ahead. May they rise to the challenge of leading our troubled world, with hope and wisdom in the interest of the common good to a better future.

'A different world cannot be built by indifferent people.'

VALUING WHAT MATTERS MOST

It’s Time To Face The Facts On Children’s and Young People's Mental Health and Wellbeing

Photo:flightsafetyaustralia.com

It’s All in The Mind: Focus on Mental Health

Details

Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 11 September 2020

Hits: 3216

'Nepotism, fraud, corruption, waste and cheating ...

Welcome to England's school system'*

Photo: Policy Press

‘With almost daily reports of failings in school management,

what can be done to improve educational outcomes for everyone?

Pat Thomson takes on England’s muddled education system, highlighting failings caused by the actions of ministers in successive governments. While corrupt actions are taken by some, it is predominantly the corruption of the system that is at fault. She exposes fraudulent and unethical practices, including the skewing of the curriculum and manipulation of results, and argues for an urgent review, leading to a revitalised education system that has the public good at its heart.’- Policy Press

......

‘Pat Thomson is uniquely placed to comment on contemporary secondary schooling. Her current position is Professor of Education and convenor of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Creativity and Literacy (CRACL) at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom).

Prior to taking up her role as an academic in the UK, Pat had more than 20 years experience in SA schools. She held leadership positions in some of our most iconic secondary schools which, in large part, were set up to address significant instances of educational disadvantage. She was the founding coordinator of the Bowden Brompton Community School. She held leadership positions at both The Parks and Paralowie R-12. She was principal of Paralowie for 11 years (1985-1997). Beyond her extensive school leadership experience, Pat also served as President of SASPA, held senior positions in the Department and completed a PhD at Deakin University.

Based on the research for her doctoral thesis, Pat wrote Schooling the rustbelt kids: making the difference in changing times (2002, Allen & Unwin). It was dedicated to the Paralowie community and stands as a definitive and instructive account of the many challenges facing ‘disadvantaged schools 

Pat has always been an outspoken defender of public education. This strong political stance has been an acknowledged feature of her role as a principal and in her academic research and writing. On her recent visit to SA she spoke to SASPA principals in February: “Public Education: For the Public Good?”  Click here to access Pat’s SASPA address.’- Excerpts from Pat Thomson: a recent visit to South Australia

Photo: SASPA

‘Prof Pat Thomson, known for her award-winning work on creativity, the arts and education, has quietly been on a darker mission: for the past six years behind the scenes she has been collecting reports of what she calls corruption in the school system.

Academy sponsors siphoning off money from school budgets, teachers fiddling test results and heads claiming unlawful bonuses are not just a case of a few bad apples, she claims. Instead, says the professor of education at the University of Nottingham, such dishonesty and greed are evidence of the unethical system in which schools work.

Her 3,800 examples of bad practice, mainly from England but also from other countries where market forces have been injected into public services, tell a story of nepotism, fraud and cheating. In England, they also highlight structural “reform”, with its waste of money on free schools that never open, the horrendous ongoing costs of successive private finance initiatives (PFIs), and the way schools are pitched against each other for survival.

But the source lies at the heart of governments that have allowed spin and perception to replace decisions for the public good, she says.

She has written a book on her findings, explaining how what she regards as corrupt practices are built into the system through competition, market forces and wasteful procurement. Although most people work ethically within this corrupted system, the book provides ample opportunities for the less honest to further their own or their school’s interests if they think they can get away with it. She gives the example of the boss of an academy telling teachers to cheat in tests, and the widespread off-rolling of students to improve schools’ results.

What the country needs is an independent public commission to start the conversation about what we think a school system should be doing and how best to educate young people for the future, instead of focusing on fiddling with school types and the curriculum, she argues.

“Money urgently needed in schools has been spent on tinkering with the system, structural change that doesn’t alter what happens in the classroom between students and their teachers,” she says.

A prolific researcher, journal author and enthusiastic blogger, Thomson usually visited schools with successful teaching and learning but felt unable to ignore the disastrous events she saw across the wider system, such as the bullying of staff by heads buckling under pressure to improve results at any cost.

Included in her hit list of bad practices are failed government initiatives that deprive schools of badly needed cash. Malmesbury school in Wiltshire, for example, has to pay £40 a month for “managing” a canteen bench bought by PFI, on top of installation costs. With 13 years of the contract still to run, it works out at £6,240 just for its “management”.

Thomson lays the blame at the top of government. “We have been living with this culture of spin and deceit for a long time,” she says. “I’ve continued to collect examples and now have many more than 3,800 – one of my three clips last week was a decision by the Office for Statistics Regulation to uphold a complaint that Boris Johnson was misusing statistics on child poverty.” Johnson said there were 400,000 fewer families living in poverty now than in 2010, a claim found to have no factual basis.

“If the prime minister manipulates statistics and the Department for Education is being told off several times for not using statistics appropriately, then you can see right at the top is a culture that says it is acceptable to massage the figures and do what you can get away with,” she says.

Unless policy agendas are framed by a commitment to the public good and structured and regulated accordingly, there will be corrupt behaviour and practices, she warns.

So does that excuse the head who gave a contract to his mother’s firm or the academy trust that claimed hundreds of thousands of pounds for school repairs it didn’t carry out? No, but it’s important to look at the root causes, she says. Raising money for buildings and repair through PFI, with its expensive ongoing costs borne by schools, and bringing market forces into education through contracting out resources and services once provided by democratically elected bodies, have created opportunities for fraud, she says.

She is most worried about England but she sees the same disreputable practices eating into education systems in countries such as the US and Australia, where she was born and worked as a teacher and head before moving into academia at the University of South Australia.

The pressure on schools in England surprised her when she moved to the University of Nottingham in 2003. “I was shocked when I arrived by the punitive regime of inspection,” she says. “In my very first class, which was a master’s class of mostly headteachers, one introduced herself saying ‘Hello, I’m a failed headteacher’. It upset me that someone should take on that as their identity.

“Then I started to see waste of money, not at school level, but higher up with people spending a lot on schools that never opened, while those that were open were having to cope with the most appalling buildings,” she says.

Critical though she is of the Conservative government, she acknowledges waste was rife under Labour too. For example, the Blair government’s early academies cost on average £3m over budget, with the shortfall covered by the government, not sponsors, according to the National Audit Office.

She regards the scandalous costs of PFI as corruption, citing the new school in Liverpool built with private finance that failed to attract enough pupils and closed, but continued to cost £12,000 a day, with Liverpool council facing a £25m bill to buy itself out of the PFI contract. A teacher tells her how “management” of a new sink has cost the school £88 a year for the past 14 years. With nine years left on the PFI contract, that one sink will have cost £2,024.

Despite Thomson’s concern, she is not calling for academy status to be abolished or Ofsted scrapped. What the country needs is for the government to be “re-moralised” and the civil service reorganised so that public resources are used in the interest of all.

“The call is now even more urgent to a world living with the aftermath of Covid-19,” she says. “The private has been elevated over the public good. We need to think now about how we might do things differently, how the government might forge a new contract with the public to organise the nation in the best interests of all of us. A commission could bring together everyone in education to foster a renewed sense of solidarity and trust.”

But can 3,800 examples and one book turn the tide? “I don’t imagine this book is going to do a lot by itself but it could get people talking. I hope it will inform debates about what might be done now to help save teachers and students from a school system bruised from decades of political pet policies and projects,” she says.

* This article by Liz Lightfoot was first published in The Guardian on 8 September 2020.

......

Fixing What’s Wrong with Education

Now I have a question for you, dear readers and friends of the GCGI

Please close your eyes for a moment and think about some of our politicians over the last few decades, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, Osborne, Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg,..., and of course not forgetting Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, to name but a few.

Can you ever recall them engaging with us, sharing and answering questions of significance and value? Questions about life's bigger picture:

What is Education? What is Knowledge? What is Wisdom? What is Beauty? What is Justice? What is Love?  What is Philosophy? What is Humanity? What is Nature? What is Art? What is Culture? What is the World? What is a University? What is a School? What is Literature? What is Poetry? What is Life? What is Teaching? What is Work? What is Vocation? What is Money? What is for the Common Good? What is Kindness? What is Humility?...

So my friends, how on earth can they give leadership to education? How on earth can they inspire anything or anybody to be good, values-led and a shininglight to build a better education and a better person?  

You may wish to see the link below and read further on these questions and more and discover the path to an alternative education model that may empower us to address some the issues noted by Prof. Thomson and others.

Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life: What Is a University?

……

Thank you very much Prof. Thomson for this excellent and timely study. The nation owes you a debt of gratitude.

As a retired academic colleague, may I please share the following with you:

Although our universities are very lucky and privileged to have academics such as yourself, we must, however, never forget that there are also many guilty academics who are responsible for this moral and spiritual decline in our country by being the cheerleaders for neoliberalism and the values-free education.

I will be most grateful if you would kindly have a look at the link below:

To All Striking Academic Colleagues in Britain: Turn the Strike to a Force for the Common Good

......

...And finally, the fundamental question at this moment is: Can education find its transformative roots again, be reformed and become for the common good? 

The answer to my mind is an emphatic NO, unless the following is understood and addressed accordingly:

To reverse this destructive path we need a different model of education and we need a different economic value and economy. However, these are not possible to achieve so long as  The Fraudulent Ideology reins supreme. Full stop. Carpe Diem!

Why Love, Trust, Respect and Gratitude Trumps Economics

And These are My Ten Steps to Make the World Great Again

......

GCGI Vision for Education: Serving the Common Good

Look All Around You and Pursue the Common Good

In the midst of economic, social, political, moral and spiritual challenges, we need a vision for what we think education is for. We must come together and recognise that education is  something deep and rich for the common good. 

Since the rise of Thatcher and her poisonous ideology of neoliberalism and her promotion of individualism, selfishness, arrogance, narcism, feral competition, and such like, we have forgotten the art of knowing what it means to pursue the common good.

Given what was highlighted above on the eruption of corruption with its costly and tragic consequences, leading to our divided country and polarised politics, we must endeavor to set aside our own narrow interests, ideological agenda and partisan differences to work together for the good of the whole society.

If we cannot work together as one nation for the good of all in this time of crisis, for sure we will fail a fundamental human, moral and spiritual test as a people. Carpe Diem!

Look All Around You and Pursue the Common Good

......

A New Decade and a New Vision for Education: Seizing the Moment, Realizing the Value of Values-led Civics Education