"It’s given me space to think. I’m 50 now, I feel like I’ve been given a second life, perhaps because I feel so confident about being symmetrical."My title is, of course, a reference to a 1968 Spencer Davis Group LP.
Two teachers have taken inspiration from the classroom and mixed it with booze to create a new educational ale house in Stoneygate.
Steven Tabbernor, 40, from Clarendon Park, and Ian Martin, 41, from Rutland, are hoping to bring real ale-ducation to the masses with a new micropub set to open next month.
The Real Ale Classroom, in Allandale Road, was successfully granted a liquor licence last week and now the race is on fit out the unit in time for Christmas.
The compact bar will stock a selection of beers, ciders, stouts, ales and perrys from around Leicestershire - as well as bordering counties - with educating drinkers on the finer points of locally brewed booze as its main aim.I tried a bitter brewed somewhere near Melton, but they had just tapped a cask of Citra from Oakham Ales (actually brewed in Peterborough) so I had a taste of that too.
Conventional psychiatry tends to decontextualise psychiatric disorders, seeing them as discrete brain conditions that are largely genetically determined and barely influenced by the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it was this perspective that was uniquely presented in your recent programme The not so secret life of a manic depressive ten years on.
According to this ‘brain conditions’ view, psychiatric disorders occur largely out of the blue in individuals who are genetically vulnerable, and the only appropriate response is to find the right medication. Even then, it is usually assumed that severe mental illnesses are life long conditions that can only be managed by continuous treatment.
However, research into severe mental illness conducted over the last twenty years (not only by me, although I have contributed) tells a more complex story.He goes on:
Of course genes play a role in making some people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorder than others, but the latest research in molecular genetics challenges simplistic assumptions about ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘bipolar disorder’ being primarily genetic conditions.
The genetic risk appears to be shared across a wide range of diagnostic groupings – the same genes are involved when people are diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD and even, in some cases, autism.
More importantly, genetic risk is widely distributed in the population with hundreds, possibly thousands of genes involved, each conferring a tiny increase in risk.By contrast:
Recent epidemiological studies have pointed to a wide range of social and environmental factors that increase the risk of mental ill health, some of which I am guessing you may be familiar with from personal experience.
These include poverty in childhood and early exposure to urban environments; migration and belonging to an ethnic minority (probably not problems encountered by most public school boys in the early 1970s) but also early separation from parents; childhood sexual, physical and emotional abuse; and bullying in schools. In each of these cases, the evidence of link with future psychiatric disorder is very strong indeed – at least as strong as the genetic evidence ...
And of course, there are a myriad of adult adversities that also contribute to mental ill health (debt, unhappy marriages, excessively demanding work environments and the threat of unemployment, to name but a few). Arguably, the biggest cause of human misery is miserable relationships with other people, conducted in miserable circumstances.I have seen other psychologists making the same criticism of programmes in the In the Mind season.
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| Photo: Andreas Trepte |
My first reaction is that I would like to see him try. Emma has always been a strapping girl and would, I imagine, be the bookies' favourite in a fight with Bloom. It is far more likely that she would spank him.May I volunteer to be the first to spank her silly bottom?— Godfrey Bloom (@goddersbloom) February 16, 2016
Something her mother should have done years ago. https://t.co/KuglESukcQ
"It was politically very traumatic, but it was actually good policy. One of my colleagues, I think, came up with the phrase that we got 8 out of 10 for the policy but 2 out of 10 for the politics.
"The problem was that we made this pledge about not increasing student tuition fees – it was disastrous, it was not deliverable. ...
"We got hammered for it – loss of trust, all those things. But it wasn’t deliverable in the financial climate of the coalition.
"My job was to try to make the best of a bad job and produce a system which was genuinely progressive. It is. Nobody pays fees; they pay a form of graduate tax when they leave, depending on their income.
"The universities as a consequence are now quite well funded, unlike most other bits of what you could broadly call the public sector."You can see the heart of the Liberal Democrats' problem in the photo above - and I don't mean Nick Clegg.
