New Year Post

I keep meaning to write more, but I find it difficult. My concentration is shot these days and reading screens is extremely difficult due to shitty eyesight (so it's great to see the Universal Jobmatch* system making no effort, still, to fix up it's approach). But who reads this whiny auld shite anyway!

So it's another year. Same old society, same old problems. A few years ago I joined the Socialist Party; I'm not entirely sure why since they have no chance of winning an election anywhere.  But it turns out there's not just one 'socialist party', aside from them, and the always-infamous Socialist Workers Party, there's another Socialist Party. Not exactly a rousing vote of confidence for an ideology already viewed with absolute disdain by the establishment when those espousing it can't seem to agree. I joined because I thought I might be able to make friends and useful contacts in perceived struggles to come, but they are not based locally and so I can't really get involved. 

Recently I've been considering leaving them. Not that I disagree with their opposition to capitalism, but that it doesn't go far enough. Trying to change that system by participating within only serves to validate the questionable and unjustified authority it assumes. We need not just to remove capitalism, but to remove hierarchies such as capitalism altogether and make decisions for ourselves. This way we can properly do away with the institutions that, despite all best intention and hopes, continue to exploit us. The dismal result of the general election and the continued public infighting within the shell that is the Labour party demonstrate this. Consequently I am searching a more potent ideology than mere political party membership. After all the Socialist Party and it's affiliated union group, TUSC (Trade Union Socialist Coalition), have achieved fuck all of note - and that's before addressing the issue of how the unions have let people down and are themselves hierarchical authorities.

More on this to come.

Next week I am to meet with the Primary Care Liaison person previously mentioned. I have no real confidence this will ahcieve anything, but one has to be seen to participate in the 'help' that is 'offered' otherwise one has no leverage at all. This alone is proof that the system fails utterly since help shoudl be not just available to begin with (it isn't), but proivided on the basis of need, not dangled like a carrot with conditions attached.

My main concern is that, because mental health support is so lacking and what exists is isolated from all other avenues of personal support (such as becoming independent or even employed/provided with a means to live), it will focus on extremes. I fully anticipate being asked if I intend to top myself as the only means to determine support: if the patient says 'yes' then help is likely to be offered as a perceived emergency. If 'no' then nothing will be offered at all. These are stark extremes that define just how hollow I think the system is. 

What does it mean to feel 'suicidal'? What are the actual consequences if one admits this? Will they be pumped full of happy pills, kept under observation for a few days until the doctors are finally convinced they are happy enough to be discharged and abandoned anew? Aren't people that admit suicidal tendencies merely masking a cry for help? That's always been the conventional wisdom, but what good is that cry for help going to be if there's no other help available than being dosed up to be artificially happy? How will this address the real issues at hand? Of course pills won't change a brutally oppressive system and the society at large's complicity in their own exploitation.

This, I fear, is what awaits me. That ultimately the Liaison person, whom I assuming is a clinician or doctor of some kind, will have an approach boiled down to these two questions, because this kind of triage is all that modern mental health in Britain permits. No, I do not want to kill myself, but that does not mean I do not feel frustration, within and without. We have a system that does it's best to keep people oppressed so they can aspire to nothing more than wage slavery (just ask that nice Mike Ashley, who's probably, right now, being knighted), and isolated so they cannot commune with like minded people; finally they are bombarded with aspirational propaganda to buy the means to cure the deficiencies they are programmed to believe they possess.

(* I still look on this site. It is, without exception or peer, the worst website design I have ever seen. It is completely and utterly broken, but does anyone in the DWP care? Of course not!)