The definition of madness...

...is to keep on doing the same thing in the hope that just once you'll get a different outcome. That seems to be the approach of the UK medical world to CFS/ME. I've yet to read a credible explanation of the standard treatment of CFS/ME in the UK. I have read some interesting new stuff from the USA, Canada, Japan and Australia about diagnosis and treatment suggesting there may be a pharmaceutical cure in the offing, but we don't talk about that here. In the UK, there is only one approach to this condition. And it comes around time after time.

Professor Esther Crawley is getting a shedload of funding to investigate:

<<intensive online therapy sessions to adjust sleeping habits and activity levels>>

That's a quote from a BBC report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37822068

Apart from the fact that the BBC report is very badly written, there are a few issues not dealt with:

1 This is not a new treatment. It's called cognitive behaviour therapy and it's been on offer - instead of proper treatment, in my opinion - for a long time. It treats CFS/ME as a mental illness and totally disregards the physical elements of the condition. It will probably suggest 'graded exercise' as a cure for CFS/ME. And maybe some sort of sleep therapy, though I have to say sleep is not really a big problem. Staying awake is. And being active is a whole nother ballgame.

2 What marks this investigation out is that this time it's aimed at children and young people. I'm not sure what proportion of CFS/ME sufferers come into this category. In addition, children and young people have desperate parents and guardians behind them who will do anything to try to get a 'cure' for their kids. They're unlikely to argue or refuse a doctor's diagnosis or a recommendation of CBT. They see their kid's future melting away so yes, they'll cooperate with the professor's team.

3 I haven't seen the funding submission put together by Prof Crawley's team, but I would like to know in what way the project can be assessed as 'research': there will be 734 young people involved. How were they selected for the project? Were they self-referred? Referred by a GP? Or a parent? Or a consultant? How did the team work out the suitability of these young people for the 'research'? What will be the criteria for assessing the success of the treatment? Will success be objectively assessed or will it be done by self-assessment? Will the treatment and the findings of the research be peer-assessed - that is, will researchers from other places get the chance to see what work was done, how it was done and what the results were?

4 I see a reference in the BBC report to 'activists' - that is, people - adult people - who've been round the CFS/ME circuit a few times and may have failed to find a GP or consultant who knew what we were talking about. Apparently, we're likely to be unsympathetic to this research. Is there a plan to involve people like us at any stage? Or can we look forward to another 6 years (the professor's report won't be out till 2022, for heaven's sake) of being spoken to as if we were, well, children.

5 The last lot of research into CFS/ME in the UK has now been widely questioned and in a couple of cases discredited. It too was based on the treatment described above.

So I'm going to file this project under: yet another waste of money. You may think the USA is under the control of 'big pharma' but I think the UK is in thrall to 'big medica.' Meanwhile, I have friends who are into their 20th year of CFS/ME with no hope of improvement.

Hillary Clinton

Have you been following the US presidential election? I've tried not to. But it's a bit like car-crash-TV. I can't look away.

A few months ago, a Facebook friend put up a photo showing Hillary and Bill Clinton walking up the steps of a plane when he was president. Hillary has a reddish stain on the skirt of her suit. She was menopause age when Bill was president: 45 when he was first elected, so 53 when he left office. I'm guessing the photo is of a 'leak' she experienced at that time.

I've been there, as have most women. Almost 20 years ago, snatching a coffee at Stirling University before I spoke at a conference, I was taken aside by a woman I didn't know who told me there was a stain on my skirt. I didn't have another skirt to change into, so I swished the stain round to the side, hoping at least it wouldn't be seen when I walked up to the podium. I don't think the loss of blood affected my performance as a speaker.

I couldn't understand why the photo of Hillary's 'stain' appeared on the internet. Are there still men so freaked out by women menstruating they would refuse to vote for her? Are menopausal women such a threat? Is the grand grouping of middle-aged white men who control so much of life in the USA (and other western countries) that afraid of the middle-aged woman?

As I've commented elsewhere on tinternet today, I thought it would be hard to get an African-American president elected, but I never imagined for one minute it would be this hard to elect a woman. A clever, politically-experienced woman. One who has stood up to every kind of insult thrown at her by people who seem to think she's not a person in her own right but a cypher of her husband. Every possible weapon has been wielded against her: her loyalty to her straying husband and her loyalty to the president who gave her her orders when she was secretary of state. Her health has been cited as a reason for her not to stand. But the biggest problem with Hillary Clinton appears to be that for the media she isn't warm and cuddly. Not like Michelle Obama, although I wonder how warm and cuddly Michelle would be after ten minutes of legal negotiations.

Now, disgracefully, the FBI has stepped in to destroy Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. There can be no justification for the intervention. It's designed purely to dissuade people from voting for Hillary Clinton and if the man in charge has any decency at all, he'll resign.

Does misogyny run that deep? Friends assure me I have no idea how much some men hate women. I admit I've worked in places where there's - I almost wrote tolerance of women there and that gives away a lot about my attitude and that of others. But I have worked mostly in places where there was equality and fairness on the surface. How depressing would it be to discover that the battle for equality has only just started?

Creepy Clown Paranoia

Despite all the denials by police, the creepy clown hoax continues to spread across the USA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/us/creepy-clown-hoaxes-arrests.html?_r=0

It's obviously a hoax, but you have to ask why and why now - and why is it spreading?

Myself I put it down to a few things:

- Hallowe'en is coming. That's the most obvious thing. People expect to be scared at Hallowe-en.

- Some Americans are feeling pretty paranoid right now: fear of Muslims, of bombs, of the enemy within. Are today's creepy clowns the equivalent of the 1950s Reds Under the Beds?

- Political uncertainty: the presidential elections are just a mess. A lot of people are afraid for the future.

- Collective hysteria. Never underestimate the power of an urban myth.


And don't think it can't happen here in the UK. It already has! Just substitute: Brexit for the US elections.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clownageddon-comes-uk-newcastle-schoolchildren-targetted-by-creepy-clown-attacks-1584809

I'm not sure what anyone can do about this, although I have thought maybe a person of standing and known for his or her common sense could appear regularly on TV and radio and shout at us:

JUST CALM THE F*** DOWN!

I would nominate Benedict Cumberbatch myself, Easy on the eye. And he needs the work.

It's the law

I switched on Radio 4 in time to hear someone talking about CCJs. Now I'm as smart as the next person at working out what the acronyms of modern life are all about and, since this programme was about the law, I jaloused that we might be talking about courts. But to get the full acronym, I had to google it. A CCJ is a County Court Judgement. It seems you can have a CCJ taken out against you without your knowledge and it can screw up your credit rating right royally for the rest of your life. It seems to be an England thing...or maybe an England/Wales thing or even an England/Wales/Northern Ireland thing. Hard to tell..

We don't have CCJs in Scotland, where there's a whole different legal system, much closer to the French system, so that Scottish lawyers can go and work in France. And they do. Have done for centuries. Same goes for Scottish doctors and dentists. On the other hand, people trained in law in England find it difficult to practise in Scotland or anywhere else in the EU because the legal systems are so different.

I think maybe it's a Scottish thing to pretend the same thing applies to education: we restrict people coming to teach in Scotland on the grounds that it's ok to know how to teach reading, writing and maths but can you do it the way the local culture needs you to do it? Why should we? Don't we need new thinking?

About 25 years ago, I came across a French teacher working as a foreign language assistant in Kintyre. She had trained in a way that was what you might call 'traditional' in France but was alien to us in Scotland: left school at 18 with the Baccalaureat and served a 5-year apprenticeship as a primary teacher, learning on the job alongside a qualified and experienced teacher. It's not what I would want for a teacher myself: in my opinion, it's better to have some time out to study the philosophy/theory of learning before being flung back into the classroom. But this woman was obviously well trained and brought worth-while skills to her school. It took 5 months but she finally got GTCS 'recognition.'

A lot of this has to do with the fact that the UK is (right now) a member of the EU: according to EU law, you can't prevent someone exercising their metier if they are qualified and experienced. If they have the paper showing their qualification, they're in. It wasn't so easy for my Chilean niece. Her degree in English (backed up by long-term work experience in the USA and the UK), a masters degree in English and education and her years in the classroom - well, none of it meant a damned thing to the GTCS. She still had to prove on paper - certificates, diplomas, letters of recommendation, etc - that she was 'fit to teach.'

I think there's arrogance at work here: an innate belief that the way we do it is best. A short visit to schools in several Scandinavian countries would persuade you of the folly of that idea. We can learn from what goes on in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. I know fitness to teach - qualifications in other words - was a hard-fought battle in Scotland but that battle took place 60 years ago and maybe we should have moved on since then.

Research shows...

I like research. I like getting information in a kind of rational way: not through wee stories but through asking questions to determine hard facts, producing data and publishing the results. But I'm annoyed at how the research into how we live is now being reported.

Last week, research in the UK was looking at men, in particular the suicide rate among men. The rate among men aged 30 and under is apparently very worrying. When I was working, I heard several times about people walking their dogs in leafy Kilmarnock parks of a morning finding the bodies of young men hanging from trees. The things I never knew were: is the suicide rate among young men worse than it was? And what causes it to be so high?

This week, it's the rate of depression and anxiety among young women that's causing concern. It seems 25% of young women in the UK (or was it England or England and Wales?) between 18 and 24 (or maybe 19 and 25?) suffer from anxiety and/or depression. That's quite a high proportion but is it more or less than in previous years? And, of course, what causes these conditions?

Research will tell us but only if we ask the right questions and can interpret the data correctly.

The only way you can find any reliable facts is by going back to the original research documents, assuming you know how to read the conclusions. Most of us don't have the time or the 'nous' to do that so we rely on press reports on research. According to these, young men commit suicide because men have lost their 'traditional role' in society. Young women suffer from anxiety and depression because they are sold the social media idea of perfection: if you don't look like a Kardashian, you're nothing.  

I don't know if any of these conclusions are valid. My family history tells me the role of working men in our society has been constantly changing for a long time: my relatives in Fife left the mines in the 1880s to go and work in the St Rollox railway works in Glasgow. (I used to get really pissed off with people like Norman Tebbit, with his 'get on your bike' philosophy - what the hell had my family been doing for 150 years, if not that?) The women in my family always worked, in 'service' or later in factories, care homes and offices. They adapted, just like the men.

To me, it all looks like a stitch-up: the message from capitalism is if the working people of this country can't find a job, give their lives some meaning, get themselves a place in society, it's because they are lacking something. In other words, it's their own fault. I'm not buying it. People's lives are worth more than this.

I'm still waiting for a political party - apart from the Greens - to reject this neo-liberal idea. But I'm not holding my breath.

What is disability?

A friend of mine told me she only realised her cousin had ADHD when she started working with young people with that now neatly-labelled learning disability in the 1990s. She and her cousin were children of the 1950s. She didn't recognise - and neither did anyone else in the family - the tantrums, the anxiety, the lack of concentration and the difficulties at school that all pointed towards a quite severe learning disability.

In my family, we had a cousin who was a bit odd. He was the late and only child of elderly parents: mother about 40, father nearer 60. He went to school, did okay, got a job with Scotrail and kind of vanished off the radar - or at least, our radar. We only found out that he was still around - and there was a problem - when we were contacted by the police who told us his mother (our mother's sister) was in hospital and asked us to go and visit. This was in the late 80s. My sister and brother went to the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow (I was away, as usual). They sat in a corridor waiting to be told what was going on. When our cousin appeared, my brother said: 'Clock the sannies.' Yes, the cousin was wearing a blazer, collar and tie, neatly pressed trousers - and school sandshoes. It was, frankly, the only indication of anything unusual. And it took my brother, not a teacher but used to working with many types of people, to spot what the problem was. 

Asperger's Syndrome. 

The cousin had difficulty in communicating. He didn't like it when strange situations arose (like finding yourself in a hospital because your mother is ill, talking to people you don't really know). He didn't make eye contact with my brother or sister. He was happy at home, where he had an amazing railway set-up with a room to itself. The rest of the house was taken up with black bags full of rubbish that hadn't been discarded. He couldn't really be trusted to look after his mother - or himself - so carers were organised. (His father had died a long time ago). Last we heard, he was living in the same house 20 years later. 

I suppose it's an example of how the traditional family has collapsed, although I see it differently: people are entitled to do their own thing and shouldn't have to resort to the 19th century family model in which we all - apparently - looked after each other. That never worked for my family anyway: we were industrial workers and went where the work was. My 4 times back great-grandmother died in the St Leonard's Workhouse in Leith in her 80s. She'd been married and widowed twice, had 9 children and not one of them was able to look after her in her old age. 

Isn't capitalism great?

A&B

I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, often referred to as ME or, more recently, by the US acronym SEID (Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease). I've had it since New Year 2016 and have got used to the 'now I'm sleeping all the time - no, wait, now I'm not sleeping at all' syndrome that seems to be part of this disorder. I had a good day today, Sunday. Got up very late but did 2 washings, dried one and hung the other one up, recycled, went to Whole Foods for coffee and a croissant, watched a movie, folded the 2nd wash and put it away, had a ready meal (beef with black pepper sauce and rice) and sat down to relax, only to find myself wide awake at 3am.

So I went online, the way you do. Googled the schools I used to work with in Argyll and Bute, and discovered to my irritation that most of their websites don't work. And that's not all. I wanted to know if any of the staff I had known in the 1990s were still around. Only one website gave me the information on staffing that I wanted.

Is this policy in A&B? Tell the public nothing? Or is it, as I sadly suspect, a lack of staff to oversee the school websites and keep information flowing to parents and the wider community?

If you live and work in an area with pretty vast distances between schools - from Coll to Campbeltown to Helensburgh), it's really important to know what is going on in other schools in the area. If you're a teacher in the area, it's pretty well essential for staff to be in touch with each other. Maybe there's an intraweb for employees of A&B. I hope so.

Or can it be that A&B education has reverted to what it was when I first went to work there in 1977? The land the 21st century forgot, although mostly no more than 3 1/2 hours from Glasgow.

If it's not as bad as I see it, please correct me.