Category Archives: mental health
Royal Wedding grants for carers
GROUPS supporting carers will receive grants from the Royal Wedding Fund.
Published 26 Apr 2012 12:30
Bracknell Forest Voluntary Action (BFVA) will receive £4,000 and Wokingham, Bracknell and District Mencap will receive £2,000.
The money has been distributed by Berkshire Community Foundation, a grant-making charity, which was one of 26 organisations chosen by Prince William and Catherine Middleton to benefit from a charitable gift fund set up to mark their wedding in April last year. Staff and trustees met on Friday to choose 13 voluntary groups.
Chris Bounds, care services manager at BFVA, said: “We are thrilled to have been awarded money from the Royal Wedding Fund! Our £4,000 grant will supplement the services that we provide to unpaid, informal adult carers in Bracknell Forest borough. We will be setting up regular events to allow carers to socialise and benefit from the peer support that they get from each other.”
Anxiety: a very modern malaise
With 7 million tranquilliser prescriptions on the NHS, the nation is at the end of its tether. What’s to blame?
7:00AM BST 15 Apr 2012
Life was flying along for Zoe Brook. At 23, she had a fast-paced job she loved, in public relations, and had just moved into her first home with her then-partner. It was, she says, all that she had dreamt of.
That was until the night she sank to the floor, paralysed by fear, her own voice sounding muffled and as though on a time delay, while her view of the room darkened into the narrowest tunnel vision.
She thought she was dying. In fact, it was the start of an anxiety disorder that was to become her new reality, and to dominate her twenties. After finally sleeping, she awoke disorientated and petrified – a state that continued for more than three years, in which waves of panic attacks were “punctuated with glimpses of the real world”.
A glimpse of the unseen absolute poverty in 21st century UK
Most people are completely unaware of the extent to which there is poverty today
Posted on by Vicki Fitzgerald
With thanks to Rhiannon Lockley who wrote this blog for us. Rhiannon is West mids regional women’s officer for UCU.
“We were really struggling. It really did get to the point where we just didn’t know how we were going to cope. It was literally pick one thing and do that, a case of either stay warm or eat.”
(Michaela, a Birmingham mother helped by Gateway Family Services Pregnancy Outreach Team, talks to ITV news, Wednesday 11th April 2012)
Usually when people talk about poverty in the UK they are referring to relative poverty. A person classed as relatively impoverished is significantly below average in wealth, meaning they are economically unable to participate fully in society. High levels of relative poverty indicate high levels of social inequality, which as has been argued in Wilkinson and Pickett’s 2009 book The Spirit Level are linked to a variety of negative problems in society. Relative poverty impacts on things like physical health, mental well-being, educational and career opportunities.
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