How High Street Brands Dodge Disability Laws.

Can you tell whether someone has a mental illness just by looking at them? I've been around the mentally ill long enough to tell instantly whether they're ill or not. Their gait, their size, the greyness of their skin, the expression on their faces, all signal either the use of powerful psychiatric drugs, or an intense discomfort at their surroundings. A major problem for me has been depression. When I am depressed I look down, I don't communicate, I look unkempt. And in a few instances, I have been asked to leave a High Street shop, because I have for one reason or another made staff feel uncomfortable. I don't rant and rave at people. I'm not even rude. But at a local coffee shop, as soon as I walk in there is a distinct change in atmosphere among the staff. They look nervous, and they look nervously at each other, as if searching for reassurance, that the other staff know I'm there - safety in numbers and all that.

A number of years ago, I struck up a cordial friendship with a female shop assistant. She seemed to like me. She was friendly and smiled at me, in a way that suggested she was comfortable with me. But as soon as I crossed the line and offered her my phone number, the next time I went in the manager was lurking behind me. As soon as I finished paying for my things he attempted to ban me from the store. I tore a strip off him and accused him of breaking disability laws, not just to release me from the breaking of etiquette of passing a member of staff my number, but because I knew they knew I had a mental health problem. However, I could not prove it. The store manager rescinded his ban, but I never stepped foot in that shop again, until it changed hands a couple of years back. In my dealings with their law department, they were determined that I had 'harassed' staff and because I could not prove what I knew to be true I had to drop it.

I also had my books in the local Waterstones. They had stocked all my books since I started publishing myself in about 2005. I then began to get offered book signings before the current Chief Executive James Daunt took over, who put a stop to them. Now and again I would pop in to check sales. I didn't do this very often, but on the last occasion, I was accused of harassing staff again. I complained to Mr Daunt, again citing disability laws, given the fact that my autobiography detailing my breakdown had been in their shop for a while, in the 'Difficult lives' section. Plus I had been in the local paper commenting on local health issues for years. He appointed a health and safety director to deal with me, but I dreaded the spectre of the corporate lawyer and knew I wouldn't get anywhere. In one of the emails I received he all but admitted his staff didn't want me in the store, checking sales, I'm guessing because I made them feel uncomfortable. The corporate lawyers got involved and that was that, even though I felt I had a real chance in court, I had no representation and I had no resources to fight them.

Two weeks later another bookshop removed my books from their shop - a shop which I had tried and tried to work with to get my book from the back of the store, into a more prominent position.

In other stores, I was followed by panicky store managers and security guards. I suspected my details were being passed around like the details of prolific shop lifters are. Again no proof. And the trouble with disability discrimination laws are... I don't sit in a wheel chair, carry a white stick, or have a severe limp or scars from serious accident or operation. I have a mental condition. It's easy for High Street shops, restaurants and cafe's to claim that they don't know that a customer has a mental illness because it isn't visible. Many of us could claim that they we go through our lives and blend in completely. But those of us with more serious illnesses cannot. We look ill. We look unapproachable - dangerous even, despite the fact that we're nothing of the sort. The solutions being banded about right now, are to have a separate law of discrimination specifically for the mentally ill, remembering that Mind and its colleagues recently won a case against the DWP for the PIP assessments being inadequate for the mentally unwell. Whatever laws may come, the issue of whether an ordinary member of staff working in a High Street shop, can tell, just by looking whether someone carries the great burden of mental illness or not, is a big one. And without some well defined research, that part of the equation is going to be difficult to implement, let alone define in law.

Hope and Fury: The Revealing of Secret Knowledge

Having a mental illness effectively means that if you wish to tell someone about an experience you've had that maybe important, through a vision or a dream or a Revelation or Epiphany, then it will fall on deaf ears. The mentally ill have nothing intelligent to say about any thing, because their minds are compromised and twisted by delusions and fantasy. Where does this leave that one genuine soul who needs to communicate something incredible? I am one of those people, or at least that's what I believe - not that what I belief means anything to anyone else.

I published this book, Hope and Fury, and in it I describe visions and dreams and revelations, that maybe important or may not. But I have had almost twenty years to think about it's relevance. I try my hardest to explain what I have seen and experienced in terms that others will understand, but I would like you to make up your own mind:

http://www.hopeandfury.com

The Dove Sun...

The Dove Sun Synopsis:

The Sun is coming to the end of its life. The rich and privileged use superior technology to leave the Earth and go in search of new planets; their fate unclear. The poor, the uneducated and the sick are left behind in the dust and certainty of death in the face of an expanding, Super Red Sun.

Nathan and Kiren had been a couple since they were children. In the small, dusty settlement where they grew up, they fight for resources with their large chaotic families. When Nathan’s father is injured in an accident, he bargains with the local Imam to send one of his children to the Great Hall to receive a dignified and religious death, in return for medicine. And without a choice, Nathan and Kiren set off for the Great Hall, knowing nothing of the incredible secrets they hold inside them.

ISBN-13: 978-1492129486
ISBN: 1492129488
Author: B.C.Bamber
Imprint: Vagabond Unlimited. http://www.vagabond-unlimited.co.uk

RRP: £5.99.

ISBN: 978-09549691-8-9

Smashwords ISBN: 9781301278336


Print copy:
https://www.createspace.com/4397921
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dove-Sun-B-Bamber/dp/1492129488/


Get your free ebook copy here with this coupon code: ZE28J https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/350949

Meds and Effects

Just started a new forum about medication and the risks and benefits of taking prescription drugs. Please come and visit and add your views: http://www.meds-and-effects.info.

Seeking Advocates for My Book.

Hi - I am giving away free copies of my book The Vast and Gruesome Clutch of Our Law, to anyone willing to read it and then Tweet, Facebook etc about what they think of it? It will be sent to you direct from the publishers if you're in the US or direct from me if you're in the UK.

The Dalit Caste Writer.

Recently I was thrown out of a bookshop. Bookshops aren’t known for confrontation and prejudice, but the world of publishing is a class system, like any other class.

I know a few things about prejudice. I suffer from Schizophrenia. I have been excluded in several different situations in my life. Everything from friendships, to work, at church and even a dentist. Discrimination is usually about fear, but more so in mental health. In publishing there are a great many difficulties and obstacles in the way of anyone who wants a career in writing. Class can be one of them.

A degree from Oxford or Cambridge or any good English degree will get you past a few hurdles, least of all how to write. But the largest one is money. If you can prove you can make money for your agent, your publisher or television and film company then you’re in the door. And that’s fine. But what if you have a background like mine?

Welcome to the world of the Dalit Caste Writer. We are the untouchables of the publishing industry. Do be an untouchable, you need the following attributes: no English degree, no agent, no publisher and most importantly you need to be vain and stupid enough to publish your own work. If you have all four of these things, then you are a Dalit; an untouchable.

The fact is there are thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, writing terrible books and sending manuscripts to a limited number of agents and publishers and there are thousands of self publishers, pushing their books onto the booksellers; of which there are only handful. This is why the Dalit Caste Writer exists. We self create our own exclusion, due to our huge numbers.

In my time, I have written to vast numbers of people asking to help me with my career. When I became unwell at the age of 20, I knew my life was all but over. The diagnosis of Schizophrenia doesn’t come along straight away. First you’re put into a pre-Schizophrenia bracket called Schizophreniform, when you have had all the symptoms for at least six months then you get the dreaded and most life changing diagnosis in the medical literature. Once there you will be feared, dreaded even, wherever you go. Friends and family alike will freak out badly if you say or do anything weird. I have been cast out of a dentist’s chair mid exam, asked to leave a church, a super-market and recently a bookshop, because staff felt threatened.

You may be wondering at this stage why I’ve combined writing and mental illness in the same story. The manager who threw me out of the bookshop, was engaged in conversation with me, as if I was a customer, right up until the point she realised I was a self-published author. And that’s when she changed from listening and engaging, to calling security. It seemed to me that once an industry insider like her realises she’s talking to a self-publisher, it triggers an instant aggressive response. This is because she realised that she could treat me in any way she wanted. She was not dealing with a human being any more. The mentally ill are equally as repugnant to many people. We are a threat. We don’t understand the difference between right and wrong, which makes us unable to cope with moral dilemmas and questions. Therefore we can’t be trusted.

The second reason I have bundled the two together, was because of the role writing was supposed to take in my life, after I became ill. I wanted to be a writer from a young age. I started two novels when I was around 18 years old and they were terrible. I had no inspiration, no ideas. After I had a religious psychotic breakdown, I had masses of stuff to write about. Doesn’t make me a good writer, I just had stuff to write about. By the time I was twenty-five I decided to try a career in writing. I got work as a journalist, I published my first book to test out my ideas. All good. Got some excellent feedback, which was unexpected. Writing was supposed to be my niche, my way out of my terrible circumstances, having been very unwell, homeless, friendless, penniless and unable to work with others because of my paranoid delusions and thought broadcasts and delusions of telepathy etc. At that time I suffered from every symptom in a long list of symptoms. Writing could be done in solitude. I barely had to leave my desk and I could (maybe) earn a living. But since then writing has become a source of extreme disappointment and depression and feelings of utter hopelessness. The reason? No-one and I mean no-one will read my work, answer my letters, emails and calls and those I have cornered at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, just simply refused to help. This feeling of being besieged by writers like me, is something I can understand. But at the same time, it doesn’t help me at all. I just wanted one chance, to escape a life which is killing me. Like some pathetic X-Factor contestant I find myself having invested far too much emotional energy in hoping that writing will help me escape the illness, the economic trap I’m stuck in and give me a little self-respect for a change. Do I blame the culture of wanting to become a writer, do I blame the rudeness and ignorance of the publishing industry, or do I blame myself, for wanting a future that just wasn’t and never has been available to me? Should I give up and lead a solitary and excluded way of life? According to recent life expectancy figures, I’ve got fifteen years of my life left (I’m 38). I lost my whole adult life, on this cruel and relentless illness. And when it kills me (and it will), my family will mourn my passing and then the other 7 billion people on Earth will experience one more unremarkable day.

What gets to me, and really I shouldn’t let it, is that one of the most prestigious Literature Festivals in the world sits a hundred yards away from my house each year. I look at it as if it’s a mirage. I walk past it with my head down and a pang of anxiety and anger in the pit of my stomach. I can’t possibly be this close to world’s finest writers, publishers and agents and yet so far away it may as well be in Timbuktu. It is all of those things. Close but far away. The white tents and The Times stands and the occasional glimpse of Mariella Fostrop, or Lord Winston; the Cheltenham Literature Festival attendants whizzing around moving stock and directing customers to right tent for the right event. All the bustle, the big television broadcasting trucks. All of it a mirage. I am an untouchable and I cannot reach out and touch them, because they are not there. Not for me anyway.

Dying to Take Drugs.

I just thought I'd share with you this qoute in todays Indepedent:

Dr David Shiers, co-author of the “Healthy Active Lives” statement, said: “The evidence is now clear – weight gain, cardiovascular risk and metabolic disturbance commonly appear early in the course of emerging psychosis and are potentially modifiable. As clinicians, if we dismiss these disturbances as being of secondary to controlling their psychiatric symptoms, we may be inadvertently condoning a first step on a path towards physical health inequalities for these young people. This vulnerable group needs a far more holistic and preventive approach.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/psychiatrists-call-for-action-over-premature-deaths-of-mentally-ill-8664106.html

The second part of the qoute is one of the things I complained about in a recent letter writing campaign, writing to all the players in UK Mental health care, including the regulators. 'If we dismiss these disturbances as being of secondary to controlling their psychiatric symptoms, we may be inadvertenty condoning a first step on a path towards physical health inequalities...' A bit of long winded way to say that the risk to benefit ratio, is too high, when taking psychiatric drugs. They will kill you by the age of about 55-60. If you're lucky enough to live that long. Given the laws of averages, lowering life expectancy by 15 to 20 years, means that many are dying much much earlier than that and are bringing the average downards. And by a lot.