Everytime theres a break in near me and they get caught it’s been people from the neighbouring council estates

Well it’s not going to be nice well off people from the suburbs, is it…

People I know who’ve been in jail aren’t victims just arseholes and scrotes

Arseholes and scrotes can be victims too.
You’re right though, some people are just animals, despite being given every opportunity to be something better. They are not the majority of people in the criminal justice system, though.
I worked with very vulnerable kids and kids in the care system for 15 years. The damage that had been done to these kids and the failures inherent in the system made prison almost inevitable for many.
It’s easy for us outside of their lives to judge people for what we see as choices, because we have choices. For a lot of these kids, there are no good choices. The problem is, to the average punter, these kids are just arseholes or scrotes.

Sod it, I’ll bite.

I once worked with a kid from Somalia who’d seen and experienced some truly horrifying stuff.

She started drinking pretty hard at about 13, was smoking weed and doing pills by 14 and was a junkie before her 16th birthday.
She said she started drinking to try to forget, then that didn’t work, so she tried a few “recriational” drugs which worked for a while, but wore off and she ended up on heroin because it did exactly what she was looking for, it made it all go away for a little while.

Most, if not all of the drug addicts I’ve known have similarly horrible stories to tell.

Some of you on here are making weird assumptions and even seem to know what drugs he was on, facts are he was high, psychotic, aggressive, violent and extremely unpredictable.

There’s some assumptions of your own in there, to be fair. If the paramedics considered him a serious danger to himself or others or psychotic, chances are they’d have taken steps to have him sectioned.

Three paramedics just let him walk off a few minutes after waking him up, so so much for him needing medical help.

If he doesn’t want to be helped, there’s not a lot they can do. They can’t really hold him against his will unless he’s being sectioned.
They can try to convince him to get help, but unless proven otherwise, he has the assumed capacity to make his own decisions, including refusing treatment. The fact that they’ve left him suggests their risk assessment was not as severe as yours.

Look, you’re probably right, he most likely was an addict trying to break in, but your OP gave enough room for the doubters to start poking holes and some of the subsequent attitudes on display were bound to provoke a debate. What were you hoping for when you started this thread? Validaiton, sympathy or a bit of an argument? This is the internet, not the lads down the pub, people are going to disagree with you.

secondly when I moved to Sheffield a few years back there were and still are lads on this estate that would put a bullet in you for helping a smack head they have had issues with

Cool story.

But you didn’t advocate for leaving our hypothetical junkie alone, you advocated for kicking him in the head.

So if your backstory is that you’d like to avoid getting shot, how would kicking a drug addict in the head help you avoid the attentions of said shooters? I’m not an expert in drug dealers, but I’d say they might have an opinion about someone kicking their customers in the head for no reason. Either way, it’s definitely going to get the attention of the very people you’re professing you want to avoid.

Don’t assume you know me or who I’ve had to be to get out of a hell hole

Don’t go around advocating violence against people on an internet forum if you don’t like people disagreeing with you.

I dont know, people are complicated and make no sense sometimes.

Agreed.

To look for the positive in all of it, no-one got hurt or burgled.
I’m sure it’s been pretty horrible for you and now probably isn’t the time for self-reflection or arguing about it on the internet.

I’m going to bed.

Peace.

being a saint could have got me stabbed

and yes I intended to smash his face in, sorry about that.

So you’ll risk getting stabbed if it means you get to smash someone’s face in, but not to check someone’s alive?

Which of those two situations do you think might draw out a violent response from someone you think might have a knife?

Also, you’re worried about getting stabbed by a heroin addict, but only if he’s unconscious?

Is confuse.

So out of six stabbing attempts people have little to fear, Okaaaay

Spent 15 years as a youth/care worker in some pretty tough areas. The odd knife event is an occupational hazard, I’m afraid. It’s never particularly exciting, mostly quite sad and a bit depressing really.

I agree best kick him in the skull first before you find out,

In my experience, people that talk this way are the first ones to fill their trousers or cry when the stool hits the fan.
Also, just be mindful that you’re advocating violence on a public forum…

Having had a couple of heroin addicts, a couple of alchololics and several very angry teenagers either attempt or threaten to stab me with various pointy things over the years I can attest that the average adult male has very little to fear from an addict, armed or otherwise.

If the OP wasn’t worried about getting stabbed when he decided to go looking for his would be burglar, why would he suddenly be worried about being stabbed when he finds him unconscious on the floor?

Hang on, OP.

You were big and brave enough to go out on your own at night looking for him (and therefore, presumably, a confrontation) but not brave enough to give first aid/assistance to someone you said yourself might be dying?

Big guy.

Arguing over non-existent diagnoses is a losing battle. Trump’s an awful president. Biden is a terrible candidate, especially when you look at all the excellent candidates the DNC had to choose from.
The Democrats completely misunderstood the appeal of Trump. They thought he got in because he is an old, straight white guy, so fielded their own. The Democrats have become so blinded by identity politics they thought that matching like with like would get them through.
Trump won because he’s an outsider and an anomaly, if he wins again, it will be for the same reason.

Toff catches a nasty cough
Granny keeps it quiet
Like when she had mummy killed*

*Allegedly.

There’s already plenty of civil conflict going on, not much of it from Trump supporters.

I’m not super worried about conflict if Trump loses, there’ll be a lot of shouting and protesting and the odd incident, but it’ll fizzle out.

I’m more worried about violence if Trump wins.

I feel bad for Americans.
The choices they’ve been given to vote for are a pervy old man with a dodgy family and declining faculties or another pervy old man with a dodgy family and declining faculties.
The Democrats learned nothing from 2016 and have picked a candidate from the same stock as Clinton and the like. Biden will probably win, but let’s not pretend he’s a good person to be president of the USA, he’s barely fit to conduct a TV interview.
Trump got in because he wasn’t Hillary, if Biden gets in, it will be because he isn’t Trump. Voting for someone because they’re not the person you hate is never a good position to be in.
Not to mention Harris and her ongoing mission to maintain the USA as the world’s greatest prison colony.

There’s a really good women drivers joke in there somewhere but I’m neither sexist enough or smart enough to avoid being sexist to make one up.

If you have the number 88 tattooed on your face, you are most likely a Nazi.
Because tattooing 88 on your face is a pretty Nazi thing to do.

For hardstyle, Headhunterz is your guy. Excellent DJ.

I’m not really a hardstyle guy, more hardcore and old school Gabber; DJ Producer, Hellfish, all that stuff.

Have a look at PRSPCT Records and their XTRM sub label, some savage stuff on there.

You’re right – just a bunch of letterboxes. Who cares if they get killed?

Not even slightly what I was saying.

I think it’s probably time the Labour party spent less time worrying about Israel and more time worrying about problems it has a cat in hell’s chance of solving.

The only advice I can give is to ignore everyone else’s advice and trust your instincts.

Just keep doing what you’re doing.
It sounds like you’re doing the best you can, but it’s easy to feel like you’re not helping when you get no results.
Just remember that his ager with the world could be a manifestation of how he feels about himself. Try to keep positive, if he knows you’re there, he’ll come to you eventually.

Bruce….. Right now you sound very BPD.

You seem to be very “black and white” in your thinking.

Are you having a tough time at the moment?

Yeah, must have missed this reading through.
In terms of dealing with someone who you think might be struggling with their mental health, this is about as bad a response as you can possibly give.

You’ve tried to diagnose someone with an enormously complex condition that can take professionals years to properly diagnose based on a couple of forum posts. Horrendous.

Also, if you are truly concerned about someone’s memtal health, try asking them how they’re thinking instead of telling them, because, again, you have absolutely no idea what they’re thinking and are only going to wind them up saying things like that. De-escalation of heightened emotions is important in helping people.

I’m sure it wasn’t your intention but it looks a little like you’ve attempted to undermine someone who disagrees with you by insinuating they have a mental illness.

Mrwhyte, your brother sounds in a really dark place. What’s the situation with the kids, do you feel that he is putting them at risk?
I don’t know where you live but look up early help services within your local authority. Anyone can refer someone to them and they can offer all sorts of support from family support workers to sorting out respite or mental health support/counselling. Chances are your brother will refuse any support, which is his right, but it can be transformative and is also much less intrusive than social workers.
If you think his behaviour is putting his kids at risk though, you might have to go straight to social services.
As for helping him, if he doesn’t want help, that’s up to him, but it’s important that he knows people are there that want to help, so keep letting him know you care. That’s about as much as you can do.

That’s a great leaflet.

Just to make it clear, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t talk to people about suicide. I’m suggesting that these “zero suicide” campaigns tend to push professionals into a standardisation mode where they’ll ask “the suicide question” as a matter of procedure when dealing with mentally ill people. I am expressing concern at the focus being too heavily on preventing suicide in general and forgetting the individual people that need professionals’ help with their problems. Target based public health approaches tend to dehumanise people, making them less likely to ask for help when they really need it. For example, we should ask someone if they’re thinking about suicide if we think that they are suicidal. We should not ask someone if they’re thinking about about suicide just because they’re schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill. I’ve lost count of the amount of people that have complained to me about the number of professionals who have asked them if they are suicidal when they have presented with literally no reasons for anyone to be concerned about suicide. If people in the mental health system lose faith in the question it loses its power when you might need it most.

Of course, if you are talking to someone and you think they are suicidal, by all means ask them, that’s a very important message.

Impossible question to answer without some pretty dark research.
However, the way in which we bring up the subject of suicide with people who are dealing with problems is very important. If the conversation moves towards talking about suicide and you feel it is appropriate to ask, fine. But if it feels like you are asking about suicide to tick a box, you are going to do harm to the trust people feel in you and they may be less likely to disclose suicidal thoughts in future.

I’m just saying that all these “zero suicide” campaigns are at risk of turning suicide into another box to be ticked by professionals when talking to people who may be suffering serious problems, which can erode trust and damage the sort of good relationships that would likely foster suicidal disclosure.

I’ve dealt with a lot of suicidal disclosures and had a fair bit of suicide/MHFA training working with kids in care and students at a university. It’s very important to be careful and sensetive with your language when talking to people who you think might be suicidal. If I was to ask every depressed student I talked to if they were feeling suicidal, as some would have us do, I would likely cause as many suicides as I prevent. Those who wanted to talk about suicide were enabled to do so in as safe a way as possible, those who didn’t wish to do so had their wishes respected by not being hassled about it all the time, because suicide isn’t the problem, the problem is whatever causes someone to seek suicide as a solution and that’s the problem that should be focused on. Of course, this is very individual and requires a lot of work, rather than easy campaigns and nice sounding goals.
When talking to someone who you believe to be suicidal, it’s important to distinguish between thinking about suicide and planning suicide. This is why, when someone tells you they’re feeling suicidal, you should feel no shame in asking them how they plan to do it, as this can tell you a lot about how close they are to doing it.
I think pretty much all of us have thought about suicide at some point in our lives. How many of us have actively sat down and planned it out though? How many of us have gone to B&Q to buy rope? This is what has been alluded to earlier in the thread, that the planning stage of suicide tends to bring about a state of calm, the relief of finding a solution to your problem.
For a lot of people, suicide is their solution to whatever problem they’re trying to deal with. Sometimes it’s pretty rational, sometimes not rational at all.
Rather than arbitrarily asking someone if they’re feeling suicidal, we should be asking them if there’s anything we can help them with, try to shoulder a little of their burden with them. If they are truly planning a suicide and want someone to talk them out of it, you won’t have to ask a list of questions about it, you just have to make yourself available and listen.
Unfortunately, some people have decided and don’t want to be talked out of it, so no-one will know until it’s too late, but that is their choice.
We will never reduce suicides to zero, but we can try to do better to help people find different solutions to their problems.

I’ve just quit a job working as a disability mentor for a major university. There were a lot of reasons why I quit, mostly related to childcare and such but I have to admit I would have found it very hard advising students through this next year.
There is absolutely no way that students should be paying fees for university this year, as the service they will be recieving will be a pale imitation of what university should be. Most of the lectures will be old recordings, remote seminars and tutorials are usually a joke and all the Union/society/social stuff will be all but nonexistent.
Assessments will be an absolute mess, as students will be applying for mitigation left, right and centre when things don’t go well for them.
Prices for halls are insane, more so when they’re off campus private animals. We had a student last year paying £500 a month just to park their car at halls. When we looked into it, the company were taking the piss and we got the student a refund, but only because they were disabled. It never ceases to amaze me the size of the industry around taking money off students.

Couldn’t agree more

I’m a stay at home dad and I get a lot of grief for it off people, mostly “banter” but there’s often a bit of venom behind it. Whenever I’m out with the boy I get all the babysitting comments and when my wife spent a few days in hospital last week, she and at least 3 of her friends were terribly worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope on my own for four days with a 2 year old. I spent more time on the phone assuring people I could manage than I did parenting.
It’s interesting to me how people just assume that my wife is in charge of all the parenting, even she sometimes forgets I’m a competent parent and starts telling me how to do the simplest things. I’ve never really been career minded and she’s a company director so me being the stay at home parent was always going to be the setup. We’re having a second in a couple of weeks and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s like I’ve finally found something I’m good at, but if I dare to show off about it in any way I’m often either called something fairly homophobic or accused of trying to diminish my wife’s contribution.
Obviously these are all minor annoyances and women have suffered far worse over the years but they’re symptoms of the same patriarchal nonsense.

Stevextc,

Apologies, got the wrong end of the stick.

Carry on.

I certainly am no expert but one of these requires proper medical intervention not just understanding.

Well I am kind of an expert (at least where autism is concerned) and yes, sometimes autistic people do benefit from medical intervention. But that doesn’t mean that being autistic requires a medical response in and of itself. In actual fact, it is wider understanding that has the greatest possible positive impact on autistic people and those around them.
There’s responsibility on both sides when we are conversing between autistic and neorotypical people. It is the responsibility of neurotypical people to understand that autistic people might misunderstand what we are trying to say, whether this be through taking everything literally or just totally misreading intent and to try to adjust our language or clarify our intent when misunderstanding occurs.
It is the responsibility of the autistic person to try to be as self-aware as possible when trying to interpret social communication and to be honest when they are not finding things clear or to ask people why they have said what they said.
Unfortunately, this is the internet, where all the usual rules of social interaction go a bit off and misunderstandings can quickly blow up into conflict, paranoia and abuse.
Another difficulty is that successful social communication for autistic people can only really happen consistently where this understanding exists from the get-go, meaning that they would have to start all new social interactions with an essay somewhat along the lines of what I’ve just written, which is obviously not practical.
Autism is also experienced on a very individual basis and what seem like subtle differences can have massively varied outcomes when it comes to social interaction.
I think some of faerie’s problems on his forum might stem from these sorts of difficulties with social interaction, difficulties that won’t go away no matter how much medical intervention you throw at them. They are difficulties that need to be accommodated as much as is reasonable to do so, which is often bloody hard for all involved.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with either Tesco or Muslims so…

Faerie, if you feel that interactions on this forum amount to criminal harassment, bullying or intimidation them you have every right to report it to the Police.
However, it is very important to try to break down your interpretation of what has been said, the words themselves and the potential intention behind those words, which isn’t always as simple as it sounds, and certainly isn’t helped by people repeatedly asking you to go away. From my perspective, I believe that most of the suggestions for you to leave it are said with good intentions and are simply an effort to try to help but your level of distress relating to this forum after yesterday is making it impossible for you to see this as anything other than an attack, which I’m not sure it always is.
A lot of this feels like poorly understood communication (on both sides) that has now escalated to a level of distress on your part that has me a little concerned. You are clearly very dedicated to your cause and for that I salute you, but it can take a pretty massive toll personally. I guess it might be helpful to ask yourself what you or the cause you are fighting are benefitting from these interactions as, in my experience, such heightened levels of negativity only serve to entrench people against each other.

Freedom of conscience – protected by law.

Freedom to buy booze in as quick and convenient manner as you like – not necessary to protect by law.

Some forms of entitlement are so powerful and ingrained that the sufferer can only see this entitlement reflected back at them in every interaction that doesn’t meet their ridiculous standards. Hence the indignation.

My advice is that the OP’s (imaginary?) father shop at Aldi, they don’t muck about, till wise. Pretty dreadful to their staff, too.

I’m struggling to think of a person of colour that’s done more harm to people of colour in America than Kamala Harris.
Declaring her your VP pick in the current climate, when she has previously blocked investigations into Police shootings and generally behaved like an absolute tyrant whilst AG in California seems to me a bit of a kick in the teeth for a lot of their voter base. You’ve got a lot of your supporters asking to defund the police, so what do you do? nominate a cop as your running mate. It strikes me as a bit arrogant, like they’ve said to themselves “well who else are they gonna vote for?”
Harris seems to lack any real principles, she changes her mind about key issues more often than i change my trousers, Pence will go after her on that.

Google George Gage and then tell me she should be VP of anything.

The Democrats are trying so hard to attract moderate Republicans that they are risking a major long term split in their own party/membership by seriously alienating a sizeable chunk of their base, who might start to look elsewhere in the future.

Another Mk1 Longitude, old picture cos I haven’t ridden it for a while.
Without doubt the best bike I own.

I had pretty serious difficulties with my mental health through my 20s. Just like you, OP, I kept telling myself that I would be happy if I just had this or that and it never made me happier.
I tried counselling but it didn’t work for me (totally personal, it has worked wonders for a lot of people I know) and neither did meds.
What has worked is a combination of mindfulness, meditation and removing stress triggers from my life. Essentially, I do my best to live as much as possible in the absolute present (which takes a lot more practice than you might imagine) which helps supress the yearning for new/better things and also serves as a pretty good distraction from any intrusive thoughts (like, yeah, I could kill myself, but look at that nice tree over there). You could call it contentment, but I see it more as a general acceptance. It’s about acknowledging the thoughts in your head without feeling the need to necessarily do anything about them.
Where we differ is that my issues manifested as (often very public) acts of self-destruction. This meant that there was a fair bit of external motivation to get better fromy wife/friends, without which I would certainly not have seen my 30s.
Talk to your wife, she’ll understand. She probably won’t have any answers, but it’s amazing how much easier problems can be solved when there’s two of you.

I don’t really see this as a left/right thing (although both sides will jump on the wagon when it suits them), but there is a class element at play.
There’s always been a certain aspect of the middle class in western cultures establishing itself as the arbiter of how people should conduct themselves.
Be it Tipper Gore or Mary Whitehouse trying to control what the kids are listening to/watching or Jamie Oliver meddling in school dinners, there’s a feeling this particular group just know better than the rest of us and have the God given right to tell us how to behave.
I think a lot of the current debate online about what can/can’t be said stinks of this same borgeios impulse to try and Police the oiks.
It seems driven by the following logic, “if famous or influential people are allowed a platform to say stuff we don’t like, all them scrotes following said people might all start saying stuff we don’t like, so we need to control the platforms“.

Fair point, but I hate this kind of branding exercise. Because that’s what it is, branding disguised as virtue.
Well edited, but cynical.

Yeah, I bet they kept all them sweatshops running at capacity through all this. You know, for unity and whatever…

If cancel culture doesn’t exist, why does the hashtag #cancel(insert name here) trend every time someone steps out of line?