“The performance of mental health trusts remains a cause for concern,” the Healthcare Commission said.Admission to hospital is too often damaging rather than healing. The wards are crowded, unpleasant and dirty; there are many highly disturbed patients; there is drug dealing and violence Then there is the stigma. In July the Healthcare Commission, the NHS watchdog, published performance tables showing more than a third of mental health trusts had one star or none, indicating poor performance. While it may no longer be the Cinderella of the NHS it still has third-rate status.Mind is not alone in highlighting the continued neglect. Although billions of pounds are going into the NHS and the service to patients is slowly getting better, mental health is not keeping pace. The Government admitted in a report in 2001 (The Journey to Recovery published by the Department of Health) that too many were “shabby and depressing” and would “never have been tolerated in medicine or surgery”.Today’s Mind report shows how little has changed. They are noisy; there are people out of control; the young are cared for alongside the old, the abused alongside the abusers, and there are not enough staff to cope.
Patients whose first experience of the mental health system is of being forcibly admitted to such a place, where they are drugged up to the eyeballs to enable them to cope, are understandably never likely to use the services again.The neglect of in-patient wards is one of the biggest scandals of the mental health system.

Psychiatric wards are frightening places. He does not say he will interfere with the corporate agribusinesses that are replacing America’s farmers. He does not say Americans will no longer go broke paying their doctors’ bills. For Kerry, it may be too late to abandon the financiers who have funded his campaign and embrace the people whose hopes their money is destroying.. The party has failed consistently when through political trading and chicanery it has fallen into the control of those interests, personal and financial, which think in terms of dollars instead of in terms of human values.” The party selected Wallace, and Roosevelt won another landslide as a progressive.John Kerry offers Americans no reason to choose him instead of Bush He says he would be a war leader who had fought a war He does not say he would curb corporate monopolies.

Samuel I Rosenman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech writer, recalls in his memoir Working with Roosevelt a declaration Roosevelt wrote himself to deliver to the Democratic Convention in 1940 if its delegates rejected his vice-presidential choice, the progressive agriculture secretary Henry Wallace. “In this century in which we live, the Democratic Party has received the support of the electorate only when the party, with absolute clarity, has been the champion of progressive and liberal principles of government… It was a Democratic secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who told The New Republic in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. Without drawing a clear line between himself and Bush, he is doomed to defeat. We are the indispensable nation.” Kerry voted for Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he has not promised to dismantle Bush’s illegal world prisons.

We’re warriors now.”The only version of national pride encouraged by American popular culture,” the American philosopher Richard Rorty has written, “is simple-minded military chauvinism.” Gone are the Walt Whitmans and John Deweys, of whom Rorty says, “They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country’s animating principle, the nation’s soul.” There would be no airtime for Whitman today amid the “experts” pontificating on terror.If the Democrats offer an alternative vision, they are not making it clear what it is. Indeed, for Bush and the media magnates he has enriched there is no peace agenda. There is no programme to relieve poverty, provide medical care and protect the environment All that is for wimps. Now, they know that America is “imposing democracy” on the Arabs and making America “safer” Americans voting for Bush this time are choosing more war. The media have not exposed the meaning of Bush’s policies, preferring to increase public fear to attract viewers and justify the limitation on dissent. They could not have anticipated a return to the evils of the Vietnam years – the assassination programmes, the torture centres, the destruction of homes and villages harbouring suspected “terrorists” – in which many of Bush’s colleagues participated while serving President Nixon.