My time as a teenage psychiatric patient | Letter

Blake Morrison’s review of Jon Stock’s book The Sleep Room (Shocking tales from 1960s psychiatry, 9 April) mentioned that Celia Imrie was admitted to a psychiatric unit in 1966, when she was 14. I was too, in the same year and at the same age – in my case, a large acute adult ward at Stratheden hospital in Fife, their adolescent unit having no beds at the time. I was an inpatient for three weeks and am for ever indebted to the consultant psychiatrist who managed my admission, treatment and discharge to a safer environment.Morrison’s review of Stock’s exposé of William Sargant and 1960s psychiatry reinforces my sense of good fortune, against all the odds at the time.My relatively benign experience of psychiatric drugs was initially high doses of Largactil, which knocked me out, so were quickly reduced

Roger Altounyan: the link from a hay fever remedy to Arthur Ransome | Letter

Letters recommending sodium cromoglicate for itchy eyes (14 April) are testament to a true drug discoverer of the late 60s who had an interesting earlier life. He was Roger Altounyan, born in Aleppo, Syria, and trained as a physician in Britain. Starting from khellin, a herbal remedy, he and his colleagues made and tested many variations, ultimately producing cromoglicate. Altounyan, as an asthmatic, tested these compounds on himself.Before this, he had been a fighter pilot and then a flying instructor, but before that he had a place in children’s literature as Roger, the “ship’s boy” of the Swallow, in Swallows and Amazons

NHS warned it must change guidance on single-sex spaces after court ruling

NHS bosses are scrambling to overhaul guidelines for single-sex spaces in thousands of hospitals and GP surgeries after the equality watchdog warned they would be pursued if they fail to do so.The British Transport Police became the first to change policies on Thursday amid the fallout from the supreme court ruling on the legal definition of a woman, piling pressure on the health service and other organisations to revamp their guidance.Current NHS guidance in England says trans people should be accommodated based on how they dress, their names and their pronouns. Under Wednesday’s ruling that a woman is defined by biological sex under the Equality Act 2010, this would be scrapped.Senior NHS legal officials and estates and facilities managers are racing to draw up proposals for how hospitals, community care centres and GP practices should reflect the ruling, sources told the Guardian

UK government accused of ‘delay and drift’ over adult social care talks

The government has been accused of “delay and drift” after it emerged crucial cross-party talks aimed at building political consensus for large-scale changes to adult social care have failed to get off the ground.The Liberal Democrats said not a single all-party meeting on the issue had taken place in the four months since the government announced ambitious plans to build a national care service to fix the UK’s growing social care crisis.Wes Streeting said in January that older people could be left without help and the NHS overwhelmed unless a national consensus could be reached on how to fix a system widely regarded as failing.The health secretary appointed Louise Casey to chair a commission on social care with a brief to build agreement between the main parties on how the changes could be taken forward. Streeting said past attempts at reform had stumbled because of “bad politics”

Trans activists accuse UK equalities chief of ‘overreach’ for suggesting bans

Trans rights campaigners have accused the head of the UK’s equalities regulator of “overreach” after she said trans women could be banned from women’s toilets, sports and hospital wards.Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the ruling on Wednesday by the UK supreme court that under the Equality Act “woman” only referred to biological women was “enormously consequential”.Lady Falkner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday morning the commission was working on a fresh code of practice on women’s spaces, which would have legal force, to confirm what the new rules would be.“We are going to have a new statutory code of practice, ‘statutory’ meaning it will be the law of the land, it will be interpreted by courts as the law of the land. We’re hoping we’re going to have that by the summer,” she said

How will UK judgment on legal definition of womanhood affect policy?

This week’s supreme court judgment will have significant implications across policy areas from sport, to prisons and the NHS. It will also impact how smaller organisations manage single-sex spaces and services.The Equality and Human Rights Commission has said it will publish a new statutory code of practice by the summer, so that it can offer advice to public bodies and organisations about how they may need to revise their policies.The supreme court was asked to decide on the proper interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act, which applies across Britain. The unanimous judgment that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law should add clarity to a number of disputes over single-sex spaces