The corporate affairs director of the British Retail Consortium and the CEO of Mind accompanied Alan Milburn on his recent NEET-busting press jaunt. How cosy
One is a '24/7 centre' that is actually open 9.30am-midnight Mon-Fri and 4pm-midnight weekends. Another one is 8am-8pm Mon-Fri and 9am-5pm weekends, and is a new base for the local CMHT (as I suspect they all are or will be)
Details of six already running pilot sites for '24/7 Neighbourhood mental health centres', from March 2026. Apart from anything else shows this is not a new Burnham-led initiative
All are partnerships between NHS, councils and 'Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise' (VCFSE) organisations. One is in a library/community hall. Mind is contributing "peer support and social prescribing" to one of the services. No welfare-to-work providers... yet
'Gramsci: Everything that Concerns People' (1987), made for Channel 4 Television (Scotland) by Mike Alexander and Douglas Eadie, with Tom Nairn (trans. Fiore's bio) and Hamish Henderson (trans. of the Letters) working as consultants.
https://t.co/PL31HVckpr
The library of the future
Upstairs: co-working space, business hub
Downstairs: skills bootcamps, foodbank, signposting, cafe
With a few books, mostly on wellness and careers, dotted about as decoration
A network of nearly 200 walk-in mental health centres are to open across England by 2029, including in venues such as banks and libraries.
Health Secretary Yvette Cooper told #BBCBreakfast she wants to bring together mental health teams
https://t.co/DX79i9hSTD
Primary schools to be told to identify children at risk of future unemployment
WOW, it's an unemployment disorder, almost genetic, it's prejudice based on work status
https://t.co/vEFZRlUB0X
@RITB_ Just posted almost the exact same thing before seeing your tweet! Unemployment is no longer an economic category but an individual psychological disorder. The 'barriers' are all internal. Makes my blood boil. FFS
Dear Guardian, please stop turning the ideologically loaded acronym 'NEET' into a proper adjective and dropping it into sentences as if it was a recognised medical condition. Just because it was typed that way in a government press release, you don't have to copy and paste it
Milburn: "The warning signs are there from a very early, early age. You know, frankly from preschool."
FFS. The "warning signs" are a structural lack of jobs, especially in deprived areas. Unemployment is an economic category, not a psychological disorder https://t.co/YLbBgSvawg
Entirely unsurprising to see Mind's head of policy cheering on the PM and praising this scheme in the government press release on the basis of no detail whatsoever. Another example of how critical distance and holding power to account has vanished
Typical of what "mental health" has come to mean, this @10DowningStreet piece bundles together everything from "tough moments" to youth unemployment
But in Burnham's Manchester, people with severe mental illness had/have no continuity of care or access to needed psychiatric care
Extraordinary
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust's Brighton and Hove Mental Health Rapid Response phone line has reportedly been running on 35% staffing, and all staff are now apparently off sick
https://t.co/RTRfKCwZXT