Watched the second part of this tonight on BBC3.  I’m seriously developing a reaction to BBC sub-standard, crapshite, sensationalist, exploitative, poor, cheap, shoddy, myopic, tedious [feel free to toss in any descriptors here, they’re bound to tick em all..] type programming.

Wrong. In so many ways.

I’m claiming an insider perspective to comment on this particular series, though I don’t want to review it in a formal type way. I’ve spent enough time (informally hanging out in the lounge/unit/LB’s bedroom) and formally (in the notorious community team meetings) in a mental health/learning disability unit, to offer some insights into the process of incarceration into these spaces.

The footage of the ‘senior team’ meetings was depressing. And familiar. An emphasis on “fake findings”. That is, kind of meaningless findings, that are just non findings. Er, he/she is ‘er, hearing voices’ that ‘er, may or may not be’, ‘er, potentially life threatening’.. Or made up, gleaned from the latest favourite programme, part of an elaborate setting..’ The tendency of ‘professionals’ involved to seize on what they recognise from their training, rather than engaging with what they were hearing from the young people talking to them, was crap.

I’m weary of tripping around being the mother of a child/young dude like LB. There is no space to say to say ‘this is shite, don’t waste our time’. Even though it often is.

Investigation and observation fuelling/feeding off/creating/generating issues. Common sense ditched in favour of sensationalist/overblown/salary endorsing nonsense that painfully left family members at sea and ‘patients’ lost. Experiences were framed in a pathological/medicalised way that left no space for creativity, originality, difference despite constant background footage of community, engagement, enjoyment and sociability.

A set of beings and behaviours packaged into a tight, awkward and wrong fitting set of parameters.