London Riots: Symptom of a deeper Malaise
http://www.christianconcern.com/blog/london-riots-symptom-of-a-deeper-malaise
Published: August 9th, 2011
The riots which are taking place in London are a symptom of a deeper malaise. A heavier police presence tonight may bring them under control, but it will only be dealing with an expression of a far deeper problem.
Britain is a power-keg of frustrations. Despite the incredible increase in living standards in the last 50 years, UK citizens are increasingly unhappy. Mental health problems are on the rise and people are feeling lost and isolated without family, community and faith.
The rioters are unlikely to have been taught to take responsibility for their actions or to respect authority. They do not mind if they destroy their own communities because they have little to lose. They will have been in schools which lacked discipline and where they learnt that they can behave how they like with few consequences for their actions.
People will say that the State needs to spend more money to solve the problem. The Government certainly needs to restore discipline in schools as part of its solution to these problems. Yet ultimately the answer does not lie with the State - we need a moral revolution.
In the past, the authority of teachers was respected in the classroom – can’t that be restored? How was it lost so quickly? As a nation we need to look after each other, but not create welfare state dependency without teaching people to take responsibility for their lives.
Then we have the breakdown of the family – how many of those rioting have fathers who take an interest in their lives? I would guess at very, very few. The breakdown of the family is a result of the nation choosing sexual liberation over sexual restraint, causing a huge surge in the divorce rate and in fatherlessness. The consequences have been disastrous for society. The Government needs to support marriage as a priority and address the decline of the family. But again, we need a complete moral revolution that will encourage people to take responsibility for their sexual behaviour, their marriages and their children.
The deepest problem of all is that Britain has, largely, rejected the Christian faith. This is why we now exist in a moral void. The Bible teaches us to train the young from an early stage to honour their parents, to honour authority and to honour God. If we do this, it will go well with the nation.
Yet instead of Christianity we have political correctness which providers the ‘moral’ compass for our political class and much of the establishment. What a terrible exchange. As discussed here, political correctness is a concept that arose from a Marxist Institute in the 1920’s. It is an ideology that is man-made and which is utterly hostile to the Christian faith. It is a morally relativist system which makes excuses for those who commit crime and portrays them as the victims. Political correctness is responsible for schools where the teachers cannot discipline the pupils and for an undermining of authority.
As we see the bad fruits of rejecting God, my prayer is that there will be a window of opportunity for this nation to wake up to the damage that has been caused and change direction.
And if these youngsters could be brought to Christ then that would be the greatest victory of all. They would have a new identity, a new purpose and a new calling in life. They would be able to live for Christ, not just live for cheap thrills.
Let’s start praying. We need a revival in this nation. We need a moral revolution.
Andrea
Andrea is the CEO of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre. She is married with four children.
Mental health remains the poor relation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2011/jul/21/mental-health-problems-increase
GPs are having to deal with the rise in mental illness, and a more integrated approach to physical and mental health is vital, say Martin Lindsay and Marc Lester
The gulf between physical and mental health is huge, with just £11bn of the National Health Service's annual budget spent on the latter.
It's the classic iceberg syndrome, and what is starting to emerge from beneath the waterline of public awareness is just how many people are affected by mental illness at some time in their lives.
The rise in mental illness and its impact on society has long been predicted by bodies as diverse as the World Bank, British Medical Journal and Royal College of Psychiatrists. One in four of us will be affected by mental illness during our lives. Dementia will beset more than one million people in the UK by 2015, and many GPs see as many patients for depression as high blood pressure, which is the commonest physical ailment.
This increase is evident in the number of patients showing up at surgeries across north London with mental health problems.
This is reported to be as many as 50% of consultations in some surgeries, with common conditions including depression and anxiety.
It is a major concern within our profession, because GPs are often isolated and at the coalface of the problem. We see the impact of poor mental health on a daily basis and wrestle with the dilemma of what can be done within the confines of a 10-minute appointment slot.
It may be that the newly emerging clinical consortia boards provide an opportunity to redress the balance if given adequate financial resources.
One solution would be for primary and mental health trusts to pay greater attention to what GPs have to say. This would improve efficiencies without necessarily increasing costs.
A positive experience of this is our work with Barnet, Enfield and Haringey mental health NHS trust, which asked GPs what sort of additional training and support they needed.
This is, of course, limited by financial austerity, but includes the recent launch of a "one-stop" mental health referral service offering a faster, more responsive service that triages, screens and signposts patients to the appropriate service within 24 hours. This co-operative and practical approach to problem-solving is the way forward.
The trust is increasingly shaping services in alignment with primary care physicians and their day-to-day needs. This includes a primary care academy, which will provide GPs with training days, workshops and interactive multimedia events where they can learn more about various areas of mental health and share experience and best practice.
There are many reasons for the rise in incidence of mental illness, but two of the biggest contributing factors we see are the stress caused by increasing the age of retirement and the dynamics of the modern family.
Our society's fixation on material wealth and status is exacting its price as we work longer and harder, to the detriment of our own wellbeing. The global recession, and some employers' unspoken expectation that we work longer and harder, are contributing to the problem.
In our increasingly busy lives, it is worth stepping back and realising that our most valuable possession is our health. It may be a cliche, but the majority of us really don't understand that until something goes wrong.
We often give our house or car more attention than our bodies, and we see all around us the devastating impact of that behaviour reflected in the steady rise of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and a host of other largely preventable conditions.
People need to really understand that physical and mental health are interwoven. If your body is run-down and unhealthy it will affect your mental wellbeing, and vice versa.
It's about greater self-education and awareness, but it's also about ensuring that health services work more closely in partnership with one another and reflect the synergy of our own bodies and minds.
• Martin Lindsay is GP lead for mental health in Haringey, north London, and Dr Marc Lester is clinical director of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey mental health NHS trust
What's Behind the London Riots?
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/08/whats-behind-london-riots/41021/
Uri Friedman Aug 09, 2011 2,652
As thousands of policemen prepare to confront a fourth night of rioting and looting in and around London, law enforcement officials and Londoners are scrambling to identify the hooded, masked young people who have been wreaking havoc following the fatal police shooting of a black man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham. The authorities are uploading images of rioters to Flickr as unofficial sites like Catch a Looter, Identify the London Rioters, and London Riots Facial Recognition spring up (there's even a debate about whether the perpetrators should be called "thugs" or "protesters"). Against that backdrop, British commentators and politicians are taking a step back from the minute-by-minute updates to ask three critical questions: Who are the protesters? What do they want? And what explains their behavior? Let's take a look at some of the most prominent theories to answer these questions (several analysts combine several of these points:
•'Opportunistic Criminality' London's acting police commissioner Tim Godwin has characterized the rioting as "pure criminality" capitalizing on the Duggan incident--a sentiment echoed by Prime Minister David Cameron. Lindsay Johns at The Daily Mail argues that there is "no 'legitimate grievance' behind the mass thuggery, only feral mob rule which should have no place in a civilised society."
•Austerity Measures Over the weekend, Labour Party MP Chris Williamson suggested that the ruling Conservative Party's austerity measures--a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes--could in part be to blame for the unrest. "Why is it theTories never take responsibility for the consequences of their party’s disastrous policies," he tweeted.
•Simmering Problems Among Black Youth Stafford Scott, who was one of the first to learn of Duggan's death, notes at The Guardian that this weekend, "instead of imploding and turning inward and violent among themselves, as they have been doing for the past decade, the youths exploded." While the "trigger may well have been the killing of Mark Duggan and the insensitive treatment of his family," he adds, the "warning signs" "have long been there for those of us who engage with black youths."
•Simmering Problems Among All Youth The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders claims the events of the past few days aren't "race riots" or "political riots" but rather an explosion of violence from Britain's "futureless youth"--a "'lost generation' of young high-school dropouts" that is "far larger than most other Western countries." He points out that the rioters, who are almost all under 20, hail from mostly poor neighborhoods, "thick with public-housing towers and short on employment opportunities."
•Hard Economic Times After dismissing police failures, ethnic tensions, unemployment, and spending cuts as root causes, The Telegraph's Mary Riddell points an accusing finger at a "global economy poised for freefall." London's riots, she explains, "are the proof that a section of young Britain--the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes--has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation."
•Wealth Disparities The "policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms," writes Nina Power at The Guardian, and poverty, high unemployment, and resentment toward the police are all factors. But the bigger pictures is that the riots are taking place in "a country in which the richest 10 percent are now 100 times better off than the poorest" and where, "according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country."
•No Silver-Bullet Explanation "The media is showing us hour after hour of Outraged Upstanding Citizen all saying the same thing because Upstanding Citizens tend to hit journalists less," British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr writes. "There is an echoing void when it comes to the other side of the story, a void that is being filled with image after horrible image and calls for looters to be flogged in public squares and theorising about the legitimate social political grievances that drove them to commit inexcusable acts. Both camps are as bad as each other."
