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martin cadwell AA1 mental health

Friday 19 September 2025 at 06:51

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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Thursday 25 September 2025 at 06:01

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' to eliminate caldwell returns (take note of the position of the minus sign) or 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media.

UPDATED 21:48 WEDNESDAY 24TH SEPTEMBER 2025

hegemo.co.uk (one of my websites) accepts anonymous messages either at the bottom of the home page (index page) or via the 'Contact Us' message box. You can use any name you want, but I advise you use a memorable one that should be unusual enough to be recognised as not the same as someone else. The purpose of the site is to allow anonymous messages from users who want to express how they feel. I have publicly shown myself within this blog, hold down the CTRL key for a new page and click the tag 'interview', on the right of these posts to read two posts. Here is the link: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=interview

Search yourself as I have done and share how you feel. Some advice: If you identify that you have a urge to hurt someone don't write it down. That is, in all probability, not really you. Even if you want to write, 'Sometimes I want to punch my boss', don't claim it as yourself; instead hand it off to someone else, as in: 'If someone punched my boss I would celebrate or laugh. OR 'If that nasty woman in high heels punched my boss I would buy everyone a drink because she will be sacked.' Stuff like that. The hardest part is being honest with yourself. Once you are honest, claim it as being you. My outpouring says I am mean and cruel - I am, I am also kind and considerate. I chose not to include that because I was exploring my PTSD, and that means finding the bad stuff. Recognising myself is part of the process of 'habituation'.

Your messages will only go to an email address 'info@hegemo.co.uk' and from there, I will add them to a subdomain blog page which allows tags; so include the tags you want. You can email me at info@hegemo.co.uk in the normal way from your email account, if you want to discuss anything and want a reply.

silhouette of a female face in profile mental health

[ 9 minute read ]

Friday the 10th of October is World Mental Health Day. The World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) introduced World Mental Health Day in 1992. This post is in preparation of that day. My focus is to rehash one of my websites to meet the 10th October 2025 deadline.

AA1 mental health

This post is the only one tagged, 'AA1 mental health' if you want to come back to it. It is alphabetically first in the tag list on the right. It may be picked up by your search engine in a few days time.

If you click on a link within this post, remember to hold down the 'CTRL' key to open it in a new window so you can continue reading this post.

With a certain amount of patience and guessing, it is possible to make assumptions as to how which of my posts get found from the search criteria that the public use. By typing in my name and recognising that the most used search terms correlate with the rankings of my posts in, at least, the DuckDuckGo page ranking index, I can understand that certain words are used instead of 'mental health', yet are interconnected with it.

I just can't help thinking that a significant number of people typed 'jaded', 'isolation' and 'connection' but really wanted to type 'help'. Page rankings don't, however, give us the answers we really want though.

jaded - Only good for processing - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=jaded

isolation, connection, dopamine - The lighthouse of my mind - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=dopamine

interview - Detached Emotions and It is not you, It is me - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=interview

This last, though, follows a prompt in a very recent post. it has been quite popular though.

I might steer people interested in my understanding of how the World Health Organisation sees mental health and ill-health towards some of my earliest blogs.

If someone types my name and 'mental health; there are a lot of entries in the ranking lists on my posts on mental health; mostly after page one though, and most of them are recent posts. However, the information provided in the ranking shows that 'vegetarian' is the search term that has been used to find 'Can't quite make it out. Can you hear me?'

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=vegetarian

'Can't quite make it out. Can you hear me?' is a post in which I describe how I feel my diet affects my mental acuity. But I have not yet tagged it with 'mental health'.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=307770

'Shredded, the day went well also does not, at the time of writing this post, have a tag for mental health, yet it is ranked if 'mental health; is used as a search term.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=304766

Clearly, Google and A.I. considered some of my posts to be relevant to mental health issues, perhaps because I have included the word in the post text or because the post is deemed to be about mental health. Sneaky!

I am going to make it clear. We all suffer from mental glitches. While, I am not trained in mental health issues, I do feel that I have some experience of mental ill health, both in myself and people close around me throughout my life. One of my aims is to be honest about myself and share it with anyone who cares to listen. To that end, and with how Google and A.I. rank pages, I shall trawl through my OU blog posts and add 'mental ill-health', mental ill health, and 'mental ill health' tags appropriately. even 'mental helath', because that is a typo I nearly always make.

I also have a website that I had an idea for, but haven't been able to manifest what I wanted it to be. I don't think we are allowed to promote our own enterprises in these OU blog spaces, so I have to leave you to decide how to search for the subdomain which is my personal blog. Right now, there are only copies there of some of my posts you might read in this OU blog. However, I would like to publish raw sentiment on how mental health and ill-health affects me, and other content from other people. In that respect, I will, in the near future, invite people to anonymously submit their perception of themselves, so other people can hopefully glean at least a tiny understanding of how they themselves, and others, feel. THIS IS NOW LIVE (21:00 Wednesday 24th September 2015). Hopefully, we can learn to be gentle. I first have to figure out how I can do that though. I can control the comments so they are anonymous in the sub-domain blog, but cannot, at present, prevent spam from chancers. Even though I can write HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (v. 3.01, I think), my website is written with A.I. and I have no experience of changing the code without crashing the site, so I haven't tried.

So, I shall go through my OU blog posts re-tagging, and shape my blog on my own web site for the publication of raw emotion and sentiment; regret; hope; disillusion; frustration and anxiety; joy and happiness; even unrequited love, familial and romantic. If you feel you might want to contribute, you would do well to understand that I am not an advocate for crushing people with rules or convention. Pigeon-holing is out, for me, too. Mental ill-health is like a ball of mercury; If you put your finger on it, or try to pick it up, it will move and coalescence somewhere else. The purpose is for contributors to have a space to be heard and in the letting go of their emotions find some solace by helping others. The principle behind this is: whoever takes charge in a group of people caught in an emergency is least likely to panic. Bad decisions could be made yet inevitably those people are hailed as heroes because things usually work out well. Quite simply, these people have overridden their fears and forsaken their own emotions for the good of others. Isolation can be tempered with satisfaction, no matter how it is contrived.

if anyone wants to contribute in another way......

I just can't help thinking that someone typed 'jaded', 'isolation' and 'connection' but really wanted to type 'help'. Page rankings don't, however, give us the answers we really want though.

All of my OU blog posts that include mental, or ill health tags will also include the Samaritans phone number and website address:

Samaritans phone number 116 123 https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Their strap-line is: 'If you need someone to talk to, we listen. We won't judge or tell you what to do.'

Their webpage has a very simple cookie management process, so you can easily disable any tracking by declining cookies.

In the meantime, clicking on the mental health tag, to the right of these posts, and scrolling down the results will give you snippets such as the following, in the post I wrote on the 10th October 2024 titled, 'Hope and Recovery:

Hope and recovery:

Under the Equality Act 2010 an employer or service provider has a responsibility to consider how the individual can be best placed in the work-force and ergonomics need to be assessed accordingly, in order for the individual to continue in work or be a recipient of a service. This Act really applies to disability, which as an umbrella term, includes long-term mental ill-health.

In 1958, Marie Jahoda suggested that there were six criteria that needed to be fulfilled for ideal mental health. Of course, this was also a time when calisthenics was ‘The’ exercise and women were subjugated, either by their own beliefs, or by men who believed that women only had a specific role, or more likely, by both through indoctrination. However, Marie Jahoda seems to have recognised both a woman’s plight and mental ill-health, with the following criteria for mental well-being:

Positive attitude towards the self
Self-actualisation
Autonomy
Resistance to stress
Environmental mastery
Accurate perception of reality

It is part of a series of cuts and pastes from how I answered the questions for a level 2 certificate on 'Mental Health and Mental Health Advocacy in the Workplace' by attempting to use the null hypothesis to prove the positive hypothesis (though mostly unsuccessfully). All my answers to the assignments are uploaded as posts except the answers to one question on specific mental health conditions that need trigger alerts.

Also, I answer questions such as:

Outline stigma and stereotypes relating to mental health illness

which is also the title of the OU blog post that addresses it. (9th October 2024)

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=287136

In 'Can policy support the mental health of individuals?' (11th October 2024) I answer the following sub-question in a playful way.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=287167

Describe how policy can support the mental health of individuals, including the provision for health and well-being.

'We have come a long way from when witches were drowned or burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages. Burnt or drowned simply because some men and women demonstrated behaviour, such as visions, that may, or may not, be indicative, to their peers, of evil possession by a demon, or suchlike. It is fairly well understood that there were more ‘witches’ in the damp late Summers than when Summer culminated in a dry period. Mould, and mildew, and particularly ergot (which grows on damp rye) were prevalent, and set in, in the prolonged damp and warm days. Ergot is an hallucinogenic. Now, in the modern world, we have killed most of the witches, and both men and women are only prone to mental ill-health instead.

Gall’s Law states that ‘A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.’ - John Gall, systems theorist.

Obviously, trying to see whether someone drowns when held underwater, or burn when tied to a stake surrounded by fire, is not a good system to ascertain whether they are merely unwell or spiritually overrun. But at least, they tried.

Making a single rule to apply where it works well is a good start to making a simple system........'

If you are logged in, and think you can help, or want to contribute with either your written piece or in some other way, you can find my email address by clicking my name at the top of my posts.

Seek help from your family, your tutor, the Samaritans, Student Services, or especially a medical practitioner. Just don't be silent.

Tags: world mental health day, mental health, mental ill-health, mental ill health, AA1 mental health, your voice, hegemo

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What is going wrong with the service industry?

Friday 23 May 2025 at 11:24

Visible to anyone in the world

Edited by Martin Cadwell, Friday 23 May 2025 at 11:27

The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

The following is published elsewhere, on hegemo.co.uk, which is a platform for innovative ideas. The site is new so cut and paste the address hegemo.co.uk rather than search for it. You will see that I am a featured associate and the Sample Solution is what you read below. There is an open invite for contributors. I use this Open University space to practice writing and developing my own style, fictional characters, stories, and pretty much having fun colliding my understanding of marketing, logistics, psychology, and spirituality with every day life for many of us. Here, on this Open University site I can be wrong because as a student I have to be open to making mistakes. However, I feel that one of the best ways of learning is to use what we have come to understand in real situations. To this end, there is a open invite for contributors on hegemo.co.uk both for solutions and logistical problems. Logistics was a military matter; in effect how do we get those men from here to there and feed them along the way while making sure they can fight when they get there and protect themselves while they are travelling? It is about people but logistics has come to mean, to most of us, moving boxes.

Perhaps persons operating in different industries and fields, and students of different disciplines, would like to practice what they know on a platform that promotes new ideas, and acts as a staging point for gaining employment in their fields. Inevitably mistakes will be made and they can all be deleted and ameliorated to present a more acceptable presentation. that is the goal. Part of logistics is how to get the job we want. In any case, creativity is highly valued on hegemo.co.uk. Obviously, business, marketing, law, creative writing, psychology, and spirituality are essential attributes for any modern human, and software development for digital portals and integrated supply chains. Let's practice what we know and privately and safely critique our ideas from different perspectives.

Comment to this post if you like, email me, or just go to https://hegemo.co.uk

I will get all the messages.

mental health issues

Staff Training

What is going wrong with the service industry? We will use the Department of Work and Pension's portal to the outside world, Job Centres, as an example.

Inadequate Training

In order to save the UK economy, the government decided to pay up to 85% of furloughed workers wage during the enforced lock-down in 2020. This cost the taxpayer significant amounts of money. The exact amount is irrelevant and using it in an argument only serves as a complaint. It is just counting.

In order to fill the deficit once the curfew was relaxed, the government turned to the mentally unwell and the physically disabled, who had been deemed unfit to work, and told them that they are fit to work unless they can prove differently.

In the British courts, defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty, unless they have confessed to the charges. When the defendant presents as being a 'flight-risk' (escape) then their freedom is curtailed with bail conditions or even custody. They are still considered innocent, and even when remanded have greater freedom than convicted prisoners.

This distinction was not made for the non-working mentally unwell or physically disabled persons who were compelled to report to their job centres after the curfew was lifted. They were considered guilty (of being work-shy) unless proven innocent. However, the DWP will not allow the same illness to be used as a reason for not working if the DWP assessment has eliminated its validity.

Suddenly, there were more 'clients' attending Job Centres across the nation. This required more staff to be rapidly employed. This is where it went wrong. Job Centre staff must have a university degree of some kind. University degrees require a specific mode of thinking - Convergent Thinking.

Convergent thinking is used when a solution or end result is sought. It is linear and works backwards from the desired goal. Much of how society works is based on convergent thinking. An example is a new housing development that must have a certain number of residential properties and the number of homes determines whether a shop is also built. The developer also has to provide open spaces where they actually want to build houses. The applied determination for the housing developer is to build houses and not parks and pretty places.

The new job centre staff, with little experience of people were suddenly faced with an influx of angry people who believed they are unfit to work (innocent in a court of law). They were angry and confrontational. Why should they be angry? This is why, and is something the government seems to have overlooked: The healthy people had a holiday and got to spend time with their families (some didn't want to, but we will address this in another example). They were effectively paid wages not to work. The long-term sick, however, were still sick and were also under curfew, yet they had no holiday from their mental or physical disabilities, and did not get a national wage to not work, and many had to suffer their now not-working relatives who were curfewed with them.

The government decided to make the long-term sick pay for the healthy workers' holidays. Most of the unwell did not realise this though. They were just indignant. Indignation stems from a lack of understanding. Here is where we come to the problem. Mentally unwell and physically disabled people, particularly those in pain, tend to use Divergent Thinking.

Divergent thinking is creative thinking, and tends not to have a solution as a goal. It can, however, be used in a plan to achieve a goal. Divergent thinking for the housing developer might engender the concept of building a lot of homes close together and build a park over the top. Divergent thinking would go further and consider the accumulated rain run-off from the park as a potentially viable source of energy.

Inexperienced Job Centre staff cannot fathom how a divergent thinker might come up with a solution to their own plight. Divergent ideas simply did not, and do not, fit in with a linear Government plan; a plan to extract tax from as any people as possible to retro-actively pay for the nation to have an extended holiday.

One idea that was put forward to the government was that job-seekers be allowed to 'try out' positions with businesses, on an unpaid volunteer basis, to see if they are a good fit. Remember, we are considering people with specific needs. This divergent thinking was vetoed. From a convergent thinker's perspective, when the goal is to get money to gratify a false need to have luxury, work is the solution. Take note of this, we will come back to it.

The goal for a disabled person is to avoid further disablement, mental or physical. Luxury for these people is to be free from anxiety, PTSD, or pain; money doesn't do this. Work for them might not be the solution, unless it is on their terms, such as 'This is the ideal job for me; I can do this.' Work for people like this means a sense of achievement.

Let us now consider, the economic mess the world is in. And how if the wild idea of trying out different jobs on a voluntary basis until one job fits and is then fully paid would have solved an irksome problem. This is about national prosperity and global competition. If businesses were able to accept unpaid volunteers to find a good fit, a number of things would happen.

First, a series of unpaid volunteers would decrease the wage bill for the business, making the UK business competitive. Remember, we are not in the EU.

Second, the ideal person who can and wants to do the job will be found. This reduces absenteeism and productivity. making the UK business competitive.

Third, there will accrue a pool of people, who despite many trial periods, will not manage to be either accepted by a business as a paid worker or cannot manage to work. This splits into two camps.

The first camp includes those people who deliberately mess up their chances of attaining a paid position

The second camp includes a) people who are unable to work; and b) people who have the wrong approach. People in group 'b' are people who believe they have a right to luxury, and have taken this idea so far that they are 'above' some types of work. Modern UK schooling drives this attitude. A government source told Hegemo that the teams of Job Centre workers who deal specifically with young people feel they have to negate eighteen years of misaligned thinking in their clients.

Start-up businesses in the UK do not have an obligation to pay tax in the first year. They pay tax at the end of their second year of trading for the past two years. They get a boost of capital in the second year if they choose to gamble the amount they might have paid as tax for the first year. Any ideas why most businesses fail after the second year? They can't afford the tax bill with revenue from the third year, because interest and debilitating fines are accrued on the unpaid tax bill for the first two years.

The Trump administration has put pressure on the UK government to disallow the sale of Chinese electric cars in the UK. The UK-US trade deal may rest on this. The UK economy is not strong enough to be brave because we have people who hate going to work on Mondays to jobs they despise.

The poor training of UK Job Centre staff is not indicative of their ability to help people find suitable work; it is responsible for a poor economy that denies that divergent thinkers have a place in society as problem-solvers.

Coming back to 'the goal is to get money to gratify a false need to have luxury, work is the solution'. What we must consider is the opportunity cost of working. One cost is not being able to lie in bed until one feels fully rested. Another cost is not being able to stay up until the small hours of the morning. These two states are considered to be luxuries to many people. Rich people can afford to do this. Here then, are two opposing routes to living a privileged life. Not working and having lots of money.

Hegemo suggests using an Opportunity Cost Remuneration strategy. This however, requires understanding the Diminishing Margin of Utility and Discounted Utility, found in economics. The tricky part is placing a 'util' value on 'achievement'.

Tags: staff training, opportunity cost remuneration, hegemo, mental health

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martin cadwell AA1 mental health

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If you are logged in, and think you can help, or want to contribute with either your written piece or in some other way, you can find my email address by clicking my name at the top of my posts.

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