A Mother With a Mental Health Problem

This was always a big problem for the child protection social worker. In the main, children love their parents, no matter how badly they may have been treated by them. In the case of Susie (aged 8) and her mother Elaine, it was a matter of how the mother's behaviour was causing trauma for her daughter.

Susie was a loved, well cared for child, of that there was no doubt. She also had a father still in the family home - another rarity. The problem was that Elaine was diagnosed with a paranoid personality disorder. Over the previous three years, there had been several referrals from her school, in connection with the way her bizarre behaviour was upsetting Susie. On one occasion, it was recorded that Elaine burst into the school and literally pulled Suzie out from the classroom, because she was convinced that one of the other pupils was picking on her daughter. The school said this wasn't true at all and that Suzie was only endorsing her mother's story that it was, just to please her.

When I got the case, I visited the home several times. There was no doubting that Elaine was an anxious person. She still maintined that Suzie was being bullied with a story that was so convincing, I was sure it was true. Then it began to dawn on me that in Elaine's mind, the story WAS true. She saw the world as a hostile place and that everybody in it simply couldn't be trusted not to cause emotional pain to her and her daughter.

Significantly, I spoke to Suzie's father on his own a couple of times. He confirmed my hypothesis by saying that Elaine always had a tendency to 'over-exaggerate'. Like Suzie's school, he was also sure the story about the bullying was untrue.

I discussed Elaine with her mental health worker. He said that Elaine's condition was borderline. That is, it wasn't enough to be a danger to herself and to others, but it was enough to give him concern. He agreed with me that, in Elaine's world, everybody was under suspicion. She'd also had a couple of delusional episodes, he told me, one of which saw her ringing the police because she was convinced there were giant lizards in her bath. Such episodes, he added, were short-lived and certainly, there wasn't enough evidence to Section her. Further, she was taking her prescribed medication.

I had to take the case to a Child Protection Conference after another episode at school, where Elaine actually got hold of a pupils arm in the playground and warned him not to harass Suzie any longer. The boy's parents complained to the school and insisted something be done about her.

For the conference, I wrote a report containing a chronology of all the incidents of Elaine's worrying behaviour. In the its summary, I tried to be sympathetic to Elaine. There was no doubt, I wrote that she loved Suzie and that Suzie loved her. Records related that she had never physically abused Suzie or had made any threats to do so. I ended by saying that Suzie's name shouldn't be added to the Child Protection Register, because her mother's abuse of her, which came under the category of emotional, was not something that she could help. I recommended that the mental health services step up their work with Elaine, and that social services should remain involved until the situation had improved.

In the event, my line manager said my report hadn't been hard-hitting enough. We disagreed - she attended the conference and said that, in her opinion, Elaine was a danger to Suzie. The conference went on for four hours and finally decided that Suzie's name should be added to the register.

This, I believe made matters worse. All it did was raise Elaine's anxiety levels, which of course, spilled over onto Suzie, who became just as defensive and as suspicious as her mother about the whole world.

If anybody wants to comment about this case, I'd be pleased to hear from them.

Coffee Time Romance Review for Parallel Triangle

I was pleasantly surprised to have received this review from Coffee Time Romance. My publisher: Penumbra said they submitted it for review in July. Since we hadn't heard anything, we assumed they'd passed in it. It was well worth the wait! Click on the Link to read more:

http://www.coffeetimeromance.com/BookReviews/paralleltrianglebysandyhyattjames.html

Sally's Choice

Sally, aged twenty-six, lived with Kevin and their son Stevie, aged seven.
I got a referral from Stevie's school, expressing concern about the child being exposed to frequent bouts of domestic violence between his parent.
From questioning Sally, it was clear she was a loving mother, who cared about her son. However, I became disturbed when she admitted that, even though she hated being hit by Kevin, it somehow made her think that he must really love her. Later, she told me she loved her father, but he used to hit her and her sister, whenever he got drunk.
Because the violence between Sally and Kevin had persisted for so long, Stevie's name had to be added to the Child Protection Register, under the category of Neglect. (Stevie was traumatised by the violence). The Child Protection Plan stipulated that, if Sally and Kevin got into any more violent altercations, Steve would have to be taken into care.
I quetioned Kevin on his own a few times and discovered that he too loved his son. As part of the Child Protection Plan, he agreed to have couple counselling at Relate. However, upon questioning him deeper, I discovered he'd had a fraught relationship with his mother. She was distant with him most of the time. He recalled being pushed away by her, whenever he needed comfort. However, she had a succession of boyfriends, whom she brought into Kevin's life.
Thus, I think Kevin was deeply insecure. As is the case with many insecure people, he had an overwhelming need to be in control. Most of the arguments between him and Sally were because he perceived she was looking at other men. A fact which Sally said wasn't true.
Because of Kevin's own deep trauma, I tried to get a clinical psychologist for him, but because of budget constraints, this never happened.
One morning, I received a phonecall from Stevie, telling me that his mum was being hit again and that there was blood all over the floor. I, and three policemen rushed round and discovered Sally so badly beaten, she had to be hospitalised. Kevin had vanished. Sally later told me Kevin hit her because a man had come to the door selling something, and Kevin thought she was making eyes at him.
Stevie had to go into temporary foster care. To get him back, Sally knew she had to agree to stop seeing Kevin. However, she made the choice to live with Kevin and let Stevie stay in care. "I just can't live without him, (Kevin)" were the last words she said to me.

This was the first case of mine which made me think about how people can act out trauma from their childhoods with another person. Kevin, acted out his anger about his mother with Sally, and Sally, embroiled in the role of being her father's victim, had a psyche skewed enough to believe that every time Kevin hit her, he was somehow validating how much she meant to him.

If anybody has anything to say about this case, I'd love to hear from them.

Something Different

I've been thinking about my Blog for some time now. I like writing it, but to be honest, am running out of interesting things to say. Rather than talk about banal things, or worse, only about myself, I decided it would be better to talk about my days as a Child Protection Social Worker. During those eleven years, I certainly learned about life and the human condition - some times in the most unceremonious of ways.
As a green Social Worker of zilch experience, I remember being allocated a family of two adults and six children. The father, Ben and mother Clara (not their real names) had been known to the Social Services Department since they themselves were children. The father, being out of work, used to spend all day on his computer playing games and drinking cans of lager. He was known for his short fuse and was well-known to the police. Clara smoked sixty cigarettes a day and like the odd can of lager as well.
The main concern about the parents was that they weren't putting their children's needs before their own. The children's schools reported them coming lessons, unfed, unkempt and looking tired most of the time.
When I first looked through the files - all nine of them, I saw there were countless occasions where Clara came to Social Services for money to feed her children. There were also recorded instances of Ben hitting Clara in front of the children.
Ben also had a collection of pornographic movies, which the children had access to.
Eventually, after one more failed attempt at getting the parents to make changes, I had to take the case to court. In the event, the Interim Care Order wasn't granted, because of insufficient evidence of neglect. However, six weeks after this, the father rang me and said that if I didn't remove the children that day, he would kill them. That was enough evidence to take them, and we did.
Most children in Foster Care aren't happy. One day I might elaborate on that, but for the purpose of this post, I just need to say that these six children weren't happy, because they missed their parents and hated being 'different' from their peers at school.
Six weeks after the children were removed, I learned from a Community Midwife (Clara was pregnant again) that a new puppy had been introduced into the, home. When questioned about it, Ben said he loved his new pet and would never want to be rid of it. "After all," he added, "A dog is for life, not just for Christmas, isn't it?"

Amazon and the Like

Now I've worked out the nuances of the Amazon rankings, I check them once a week to see if I've made any sales. Zero is usually the answer.
At first I was unhappy about this. After a couple of days musing, however, I realised it wasn't my writing that was the problem, it was a compilation of a couple of things. First, I don't write about vampires and I don't write about sex. I don't think there's anything wrong with these genres, it's just that they aren't the subjects I choose to be concerned with. However, I know that these are the hottest genres at the moment and that many people, when they go to buy a book online, actively seek them out.
The second reason is that I don't sell myself. I've joined writers' and readers' sites in an effort to get myself known, of course. I also blog and read others' blogs. However, paying for my books to be put in the foreground on these sites, to me, smacks of desperation, ditto paying for a reviewer, and I simply refuse to do these things. I work on the premise that if people want to read my work, they'll do so whether I get my money out or not. As a reader myself, I get pretty pissed off with the hard sell, and would prefer to browse my way around unhindered by intrusive advertising.
Now for my Burning Issues Spot. If anybody reads this blog, they'll know that I'm a political animal and like to discuss the events of the day.
The biggest news story at the moment is the mosque near the Ground Zero site. I've read both sides of the argument, and believe myself that the mosque shouldn't be so near to where thousands of people died. It's not that I think all Moslems are fanatics. I know that the majority are peaceful, and it's just a handful of idiots, with a control problem who are making life invidious for them. For me, not building the mosque is a question of respect for the dead and nothing more.
I abhor any form of fanaticism, which means I'd place the preacher from Florida, threatening to burn the Koran, up there among the supremest of fanatical idiots. I just wish people would understand others' need to worship the way that they choose and be done with it.
Finally, autumn is here again. It's my favourite time of the year, and I'm off to the coast to catch the last remnants of its sunshine, before the winter sets in.

My PayPal Debacle

Here I am, sitting at my computer, listening to the incomparable soprano, Marita Solberg in order to refresh my mind and consider my next move. After almost three weeks of trying to join PayPal – I’m still unable to do so.
The debacle started because the publisher of Sabine Dolls only does monitory transaction through PayPal. I had no choice, therefore, but to join - or as I said, try to.
I opened a rudimentary account, only to be told that they'd put a restriction on it because they'd detected some "unusual activity". In order to lift the restriction, they said, we only need a proof of address from you.

I tried to send them a copy of an official letter but discovered they only accept files with certain file extensions on them. Now, being a complete numskull around computers, I had to get the computer "medicine man" in the town to change my chosen proof of address letter to a different file extension. (PayPal, I also discovered when I tried to send one with a query e-mail, doesn't accept attachments of any kind).
After finally sending them a copy of the same letter, this time with the correct file extension, they came back to tell me they now needed one of my bank statements, so I had to wait until my bank did one for me. Bulgarian banks, you see, don’t bother putting addresses on their statements.

In between all this toing and froing, I got several stock e-mails from PayPal, all from different people, saying that I only had to send my proof of address and then they would unlock my account. Unlock my account? It had never even been opened. But I couldn't be bothered to tell them that because, apart from running around getting bits of paper for them, I still have my third novel to complete – an activity which to me is much more interesting.
A few days after sending the required bank statement, I checked my account again, to find a new requisite which was proof of identity. After a bout of consequent unrepeatable language, it occurred to me that PayPal must have suspected by then that I was a member of the Bulgarian Mafia, which made me laugh - a lot!
All this brings me up to this morning, when I tried to upload a copy of my passport, (only the page with the picture) which PayPal promptly rejected because the "File was too long, please reduce it." (They said somewhere else, "please make sure the picture is large enough to see", but no matter) How the hell am I going to bloody-well reduce a simple passport picture with my computer skills, I thought? Ah well, I'll use my Drivers Licence instead, so off I go to get it. When I pulled that out, I saw with a sinking feeling, something I'd forgotten: it has my last address on it, which was in the UK. Bulgaria accepts UK passports but -"Oh my Gad", I thought, if I send PayPal that, in their arid way, they'd think: a woman living in Bulgaria, taking ages to produce a bank statement with an address, and then sending us a driving license with a different address to her Bulgarian one - she really must be a Mafia member!
What to do now - get frustrated and then try again? I think not. I've just written to my publisher to say that PayPal can - well - do the other thing, and we’d have to find other ways of me getting money to him, and he getting royalties to me.
What I wanted to say here is that organaisations like PayPal: beauracratic, emotionless that they are, purport to perform a service, but are only too ready to present obstacles, when a hapless, potential customer, isn't fitting into one of their boxes. They should know this: they aren’t doing the public a service, the public are doing them one by paying them to transact for them. If they cared about causing annoyance to people, which they say they do, (while coining in their commission, of course), they’d accept simple e-mail attachments, like most mere-mortal organisations. If they are worried about viruses, then I say there are enough good anti-viruses around now to zap anything untoward that some, deranged person, might want to send them in an-mail.
Hey-ho, so I've got to find another way of getting copies of my book from my publisher now. But I'd rather suffer the vexation of that and still hang on to my sanity.

So, I'm going to put on another of Marita's arias and write another passage or two, while I think of what to do next. PayPal? PayPurgatory fits better, I think.

What Kind of People Are They?

When the Lockerbie bomber: al-Megrahi was sent home to die of prostate cancer a few months back, I was incensed to say the least. At the time, I thought that the decision-makers might as well have slapped the families of the victims in the face. I also remember silently remonstrating with Alex Salmond, the Scottish Prime Minister and the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for letting their feelings of magnanimity and mercy overcome their feelings of outrage for what this man had done.

Al-Megrahi's cancer was terminal, we were told and he wasn't expected to live more than a few weeks. Yet, months later, he is blissfully happy living in his home land, receiving heroe status, after receiving a heroe's welcome.

According to popular opinion, the decision to release the man wasn't out of mercy, so much as greed. It's being whispered in some very prominent places that this odious man was exhanged for an oil deal with Lybia. It occured to me at the time that dirty tricks might have been involved here, but I didn't want to think that politicians on my side of the Atlantic could be so insensitive as to put oil before people's grief. But, in the face of many heart-driven denials by Salmond and the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, many people believe that this is exactly what has happened.

If it is true, then my view of the men and women of Westminster and Holyrood has plumetted from viewing them as weaklings, with an iffy sense of integrity, to lying, cheating, self-centred miscreants.

I don't blame President Obama for being angry and, as a British woman, I can only speak of my shame that my fellow countrymen have sunk to such a low-level of crassness.