Wood’s World

As I am beginning this endeavor to create a site which hopes to help people and provide interesting information and articles which are enjoyable to read. I am fighting off some negative thoughts that are telling me - I’m not going to be able to achieve this. Do I have the personality, knowledge, creativity, technical ability, insight and writing ability to be able to pull it off? As with starting out at anything new, you haven’t proven to anyone, most of all yourself, that you are capable of doing it. As the saying goes “The first step is often the hardest” and the first step is where a lot of people fail, often due to negative thinking getting the better of them. Be it launching a website, going for a job interview, attempting to get into a sports team, developing an innovative idea or any number of ambitions you may have.

When ever you give these negative thoughts attention they grow and spawn new negative thoughts that you hadn’t even considered before. For instance, there is the knowledge that’s niggling away in the back of my mind that there are thousands of other people that have tried and failed to do what I am attempting to do now. Which leads me to thoughts of – Why am I even bothering, what makes me any different, will anyone actually want to read what I’m writing about? If people allowed these thoughts to defeat them then some of the most wonderful things in the world may have never been created or invented. I dread to think about the potential things that could have been created by those that were defeated by their own negative thinking, or negativity which has been imposed upon them by others. Which brings me to my next point.

Never discourage other peoples ambition or creativity. Actively encourage them to follow through with their ideas, don’t let them think they can’t do it. In most cases it’s much better to try and fail than to never try at all. Not trying at all will result in regret, and regret is a bad thing. Having said this, it is important to keep a sense of perspective. You don’t want to be banking everything on an idea or ambition succeeding or paying off because if it doesn’t you might be in for a crushing blow to your confidence and self esteem. Being positive and realistic at the same time can be tough to balance. Here are some tips that you may find useful towards achieving this.

1: Discuss Your Ideas With Someone You Know Will Give You a Positive or Constructive Response.

Avoid the people who wont. The last thing you need is someone pointing out all of the difficulties and obstacles and stating things like the number of people who try and fail etc. (Most of which you will already be aware of and have already spent time thinking about).

2: Find an inspiration.

This could be a number of different things, for example a book, a film, a person, music or something like Nature. Keep these inspirations at the forefront of your mind by surrounding your self with reminders. Things like jotting down inspirational quotes and sticking them on your bed room door so you view them each morning, or setting your desktop background to a particular picture which keeps your mind focused on what you want to achieve.

3: Be Aware of the Bigger Picture.

It’s very important to have a good indication of how long something may take and how difficult you will find it (different people find different things difficult). However, don’t be discouraged by the magnitude or difficulty of a potential ambition, see it as a challenge. The harder or bigger something is the greater the sense of achievement upon completion. I don’t think there is a bigger killer of ambition than a misconception of the length of time something will take or the difficulty level. If you know its going to be hard and it’s going to take a long time, then you are prepared for that and you spend time building up to things, but if you think it’s going to be easier and quicker than it turns out to be, that’s going to be a hard thing to overcome.

4: Don’t Let Anything Consume You.

It’s safe to say that becoming obsessive about an ambition can be detrimental to achieving it. In some people It might push you to eventually achieve your goal, but to what cost? It can cause pressure and stress to build up, possibly depression and a loss of perspective. If something becomes your life, then your life becomes it, which can result in your life becoming mundane leading to the possibility of missing out on many new experiences.

5: Don’t be Afraid.

Whether this is a fear of what others will think or a fear of failure. Remember that if your not getting things wrong then your not learning. If I’m riding around on my snowboard and I haven’t bailed all day then I know I haven’t progressed much that day because I haven’t been pushing my limits. You often progress yourself far more when you loose/fail than when you win/succeed. What you do in failure or defeat is a true test of character. Do you quit? Or do you dust your self off and come back stronger?

6: Have Your Own Perception About What You Are Doing.

Be a free thinker, don’t try to archive something just because the people around you, or society, thinks that’s what you should be doing. In addition to this don’t take on board society’s measures of success and failure, live by your own measurements. For example, just because its the ‘norm’ to grow up and get a job, don’t let that make you think negatively about pursuing an alternative idea you may have about supporting yourself.

The Josef Fritzl trial brought nothing but sympathy for his abused children. But what about all the other unreported cases of children who are abused?

The trial of Josef Fritzel, the man who imprisoned and abused his daughter Elisabeth, was in the news when I was writing this article. Quite rightly people are appalled and indignant about cases of abuse that hit the headlines. But what if Elisabeth or her children have mental health problems, self-harm, use drugs or alcohol or display ‘unacceptable’ behaviour – will we tut and say they should be punished or will we say it’s not surprising that they’re having difficulties? Won’t we expect them to receive the right care, support and understanding?

But what about all those children who are abused who do not come to the attention of the public. They are very damaged by abuse: sexual, physical or psychological, throughout their childhood. Many grow up with mental health problems or self-harm or they use drugs and alcohol or commit low level crime or have a combination of all these issues. They may be labelled personality disordered. Yet isn’t it understandable if their ability to relate with others is sometimes impaired? They’ve been let down and emotionally traumatised at times in their life when they should have been secure and free to develop into confident people. We should be just as indignant about the abuse that these people have suffered. Yet what happens all too often in reality? The truth is that many end up in prison.

Many ‘survivors’ of abuse are excluded from mainstream services either because the variety or combination of issues they have do not fit into the criteria of segregated services or because their ‘challenging behaviour’ is too uncomfortable. They are left fighting against the odds and are consistently let down.

“Prisons are all too often used as repositories for those who are neglected and rejected by other services in the community.” (pg 6, SCMH, 2008)

Wouldn’t we be shocked if that happened to Elisabeth and her children because there was a failure to give them the right services?

“There are many women in prison, either on remand or serving sentences for minor, non-violent offences, for whom prison is both disproportionate and inappropriate. Many of them suffer poor physical and mental health or substance abuse or both. Large numbers have endured violent or sexual abuse or had chaotic childhoods. Many have been in care. I have concluded that we are rightly exercised about paedophiles, but seem to have little sympathy, understanding or interest in those who have been their victims, many of whom end up in prison.” (pg i , Corston, 2007)

The following is a number of statistics about the prison population in the UK:

• 72% of men, 70% women have two or more mental health ‘disorders’
• 62% of men, 57% women have been diagnosed with personality disorder
• 66% of men, 55% of women have used drugs
• 63% of men and 39% women are ‘hazardous’ drinkers
• 50% of women, 25% men have suffered domestic violence
• 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual abuse
• 15,800 self harm incidents in 2008, 54% by women who are only 5% of prison population
• 30% of young women (18-20 yrs) have been sexually abused
• 71% have been in care
• 69% harm themselves
• 2 out of 5 girls, 1 out of 4 boys (12-17 years) have suffered violence at home
• 1 in 3 girls, 1 in 20 boys have experienced sexual abuse

Source (pdf)

Given that 1 in 4 people in prison have spent time in local authority care as a child, 40% of women in prison left school before the age of 16 and 1 in 10 were 13 or younger, 30% of women have had psychiatric admission before going to prison, it begs the question - why did the care system, school and mental health services fail to help them?

Three quarters of people with mental health problems leave prison with no follow-up care. The majority are even worse off than when they went in: they are left homeless, jobless, estranged from their families, in debt and their children have been taken into care.

People who have had a life time of experiences that drain their self-esteem and sense of self-worth are treated in ways that compound this. They are abused people who are abused again by the ‘system’. What kind of society countenances distressed people who are much more likely to harm themselves than the ‘public’ being put into a prison environment?

Over the years I’ve had service users tell me they have been abused. I’ve asked them if their mental health workers know and they invariably say “No, I’ve never been asked.” How can people be given the most useful support if something that more often than not has had a very profound effect on them goes unrecognised? People should be asked about their experiences. They may choose not to talk about them but they need to be given the opportunity. Practitioners need to be equipped to know what to do to support people who disclose abuse so that they are not afraid to ask the questions. Integrated services should be available that prevent people falling through the gaps.

Let’s stop punishing people who have been abused and let’s stop discriminating against them because sometimes the way they cope is uncomfortable. Let’s start getting indignant on their behalf and show them respect for surviving.

This article is now featured at abyss2hope.

Written for woods-world.com by Tina Braithwaite

References:

Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile, Prison Reform Trust, Dec 2008
Corston, B (2007), The Corston Report: A Review of Women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system, Home Office
Durcan, G (2008), From the Inside: Experiences of Prison Mental Health Care, SCMH

I realise that I’m about to comment on, and criticise in places, the social networking culture on a weblog. Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. Therefore I will begin by specifying exactly what I am talking about in this article.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo etc. The type of social networking sites which allow the user to have a profile page, which they can fill with pictures, comments about what they are doing, video’s etc.

You may ask - What’s the difference between that and a blog? That depends entirely on the blog, how it’s constructed, the purpose and most of all the content.

There are most definitely good things about these social networking sites. The main benefit for me is they allow you to stay in touch with people who may be on the other side of the world, or people that you wouldn’t normally see very often but you still consider good friends. They give you a convenient place to host your photo’s which can act as an extra back up – Recently two friends of mine had their apartment burgled, they lost their laptops and camera, they commented that thankfully they had their pictures uploaded on Facebook so they hadn’t lost them all in the theft. Sending messages over these social networking sites can be much easier than using email, because you have a comprehensive and visual ‘address book’.

What I don’t like about these social networking sites is the culture surrounding them, which leads to you hearing things like “that’s a good one for Facebook” when someone takes a photo, or when you sense that the main reason someone is taking a photo is to put it on their social networking profile. A friend of mine commented that it used to be better before these social networking sites came about, because when someone said they would meet you somewhere or be at some event, they would actually turn up because they didn’t feel they could easily fob you off via a non face to face or voice to voice communication i.e. an impersonal text message.

I recently came across this t-shirt design to the right on despair.com. An amusing Venn diagram which shows the three behavioral disorders driving the continued growth of some of the most heavily trafficked social networking sites. Although it’s meant as a joke, there is some truth in it.

Often the things that annoy people the most are things they disagree with or dislike seeing, that they know they are guilty of allowing themselves to get sucked into doing. Which is what inspired me to write this article. I sometimes find myself with some spare time and I end up on a social networking site, reading about how someone I haven’t seen or spoken to for 4 or 5 years “can’t wait to go and get drunk on Friday” or I see one interesting photo and end up trawling though the rest of the album. Afterward I always think to myself – What am I doing? This is a complete waste of time, why would I be remotely interested in someone being “all puffed out after blowing balloons up for rob’s birthday!!” I don’t even know who rob is. The time you waste doing these things (non of which you will remember in two days) could be spent on reading a stimulating book, or bettering yourself in some way, like learning to play the guitar for instance.

To stop myself falling into this trap which Facebook and the like set up for me, I’ve decided that every time I think about going on Facebook for no particular reason, I will instead attempt to make a contribution to my site, or pick up my guitar and mess about on it for a bit, or try to discover some new music to listen to. Anything to stop myself accidentally on purpose looking though another “night out in town” photo album with the same drunken pictures of people holding up alchopops.

The fundamental problem with the powers a police officer has, is that the position attracts two very different types of applicant. The first being a person who genuinely wants to do good and utilise that power by (arguably) helping society. The second being a person who wants to have power over the general public to feel strong and to have the ability to commit what would be crimes for any non police or non military civilian.

I’ll start out by recounting two separate experiences I’ve had with the police that have inspired this article.

1: I was attending a climate change protest in London in 2006, this consisted of a march around the streets of London, culminating in a series of speeches made by various campaigners outside the American Embassy. Some time during the procession past the houses of parliament, a policeman, overseeing the march from the side of the road, inexplicably picked out a young woman from the crowd in front of me (18-21 years old approx) and grabbed her quite forcibly, dragging her to the side of the road and though a small opening of a police barrier. The young woman had merely been marching peacefully along with the protest. As a result of this incident several other members of the crowd (mostly male) went across to remonstrate with the policeman, an argument and a bit of commotion ensued. This could have easily lead to violence, thankfully this time it didn’t.

I know from reading elsewhere and talking to other friends, that this isn’t a one off incident. This really highlighted to me that the picture often portrayed by the media, of unprovoked harassment or attacks from protesters or the public in general is often false or missing important details. The policeman had quite obviously picked out a young female from the crowd, aggressively, for no other reason than to stir a reaction from the surrounding protesters. These protesters had every right to be annoyed. However, I saw it for what it was, the young girl didn’t seem to be in any real danger of getting badly injured provided that the crowed did not react, causing violence to break out. So I did not remonstrate with the policeman. Provided that the victim isn’t in any imediate danger, this is the advice I would give to anyone viewing a similar incident. However had it been a friend or a family member I don’t think I would have been able to stop myself – this is how violence between police and protesters often breaks out.

2: I had got tickets to go and see England vs. Ukraine, a football world cup qualifier at Wembley Stadium. I was travelling to the stadium with three other friends via the London underground. Not long before this Boris Johnson (mayor of London) had decided to ban drinking alcohol on the tube or in a tube station.

A friend and I both had a can of beer to drink whilst walking to the ground from the station. We were waiting, beer in hand, at the exit to the station for our two other friends to catch up, when a police officer approached us. Without saying a word he made an attempt to snatch the beer can from my hand, as he grabbed the can he realised my can was unopened, discovering this he then moved on to my friend who had just that minute opened his beer. He took the can, stating “you can’t drink in the station”. We began to protest, being as we were arguably standing outside the station. But the police officer, quite abrupt to the point of being rude, was having non of it. As far as he was concerned he didn’t want us to have that beer, so we weren’t going to have it. An onlooking police officer had viewed the incident and made his approach. When he arrived on the scene he had a short word with the beer stealing police office along the lines of “What are you doing? They are clearly exiting the station” a brief exchange of words between the two and our beer can was returned.

This is an example of the two types of people that become police officers which I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.

My two experiences were very mild incidents compared to many and they annoyed and frustrated me. I can only imagine the anger caused if something like the incidents in the following videos were to happen to me, a friend or a family member.

I’ll leave you witth a link to a site documenting 30 cases of extreme police brutality.

The Game has three simple rules:

RULE 1: You are now playing The Game.

RULE 2: Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.

RULE 3: When you Loose then game you must announced you have lost.

There is no way to win, only lose to different degrees.

I like the concept, because its contagious. It might seem pretty pointless but when I haven’t lost the game for a while and then I lose, I have a little chuckle to my self, which is never a bad thing.

As a result of rule 3, when you lose anyone who is with you that is also playing the game automatically loses too. If you are with someone who isn’t playing the game when you lose, they are now.. Genius!

PS. If you were already playing The Game.. Sorry