Male suicide: ‘Gender should not be a death sentence’

We take a two-fold approach to changing and saving lives: firstly providing support for men who are down or in crisis, and secondly campaigning for culture change to tackle outdated stereotypes of masculinity that prevent men seeking help.

We do this in the face of a problem that is deeply entrenched. Many men feel forced to stoically “man up” (whatever that means) and grind through bad times without societal permission to open up or seek help. Calm’s research shows that while 67% of women tell someone about going through depression, only 55% of men do the same.

The result? Men are three times more likely than women to take their own lives and suicide is the single biggest killer of men aged between 20 and 49 – something the Duke of Cambridge describes as “an appalling stain on our society”.

But the tide is turning. Since Calm was founded 10 years ago, awareness of male suicide has trebled. Definitively, men are talking more. Calm alone has taken 200,000 helpline calls to date, and prevented more than 1,000 suicides.

The work of organisations and campaigns such as Lift The Weight and the royals’ mental health campaign Heads Together (Calm is a partner charity of the latter) – is a massive step forward. Historically, the alpha-male archetype has had no time for conversations about emotions but, in recent weeks, this has been dismissed by men such as Stormzy, Rio Ferdinand, and Calm’s patron Professor Green – strong, famous, tough men explaining how communication has, in some way, saved their lives.

There is still much work to be done. The emphasis now is to move beyond the rallying cry to open up. We must better equip ourselves, our mates, our workplaces, schools and health services to support those who need it. And we start by building a generation who believe that society’s ideas of your gender should not be a death sentence.

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

Male suicide: ‘Gender should not be a death sentence’

Nurse gets suspended sentence over fatal blood transfusion mix-up

A nurse whose patient died after she gave him the wrong type of blood has been given a suspended sentence.

Lea Ledesma made a series of mistakes that led to Ali Huseyin, 76, being given type AB blood during a transfusion even though he was blood group O.

The nurse, who was described as the “mother” of the intensive care unit at London Heart hospital, where she had worked since 2001, then tried to blame a colleague for the mistake.

She was given an 18-month suspended sentence at Southwark crown court, after previously being convicted of unlawful manslaughter by gross negligence.

Ledesma, 49, of Stevenage in Hertfordshire, wept and hugged her family after the sentence was passed on Thursday.

The public gallery was packed with dozens of her relatives, friends and former hospital colleagues, many of whom wrote letters of support to the court.

They formed a circle and prayed after the judge announced she would not be going to prison.

Huseyin had been in the care of Ledesma after a successful heart bypass operation in May 2014. He was given the wrong blood type on 7 May 2014 and died later the same day.

Ledesma made several errors, the court heard, including choosing the wrong blood from a vending style machine before checking it against the wrong computer records.

Ledesma initially tried to pass off the error as being a colleague’s mistake and only when questioned further did she admit to being distracted and flustered when checking the patient’s details.

Anthony Metzer, defending, described the case as a “double tragedy” and said Ledesma was “anxious to accept full blame” and had shown extreme remorse.

“Even to this day, I don’t think there’s anything I can point to as to how it was that this tragic and serious error came about,” he said. “This will live with her until her own dying day.”

The judge, Nicholas Loraine-Smith, said: “Mr Huseyin was a much-loved husband, father and grandfather – a kind, considerate family man whose death has devastated his family, particularly his wife, who feels so alone without him after all these years.

“It’s still a mystery to me as to how and why you came to behave in the way that you did, and you remain certain that the details of the other Mr Hussain were shown on the deceased’s monitor and I cannot exclude that as a contributory factor.”

Loraine-Smith said he had “rarely, if ever” seen so many character references and letters of support for a defendant. “You were committed to that unit,” he said. “Everybody talks about how reliable you were, how committed. You were described as the mother of the unit and always prepared to go the extra mile for your patients.”

Nurse gets suspended sentence over fatal blood transfusion mix-up

Let"s not mince words - unwanted fat can be a death sentence

These ailments are all Go Right to A&ampE, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Gather £200 corollaries of being obese, as nearly two thirds of British grownups now are. And a quarter of these are obese.

The figures are supposed to double by 2050, despite the fact that I’m not sure how we can have “four thirds” – maybe, like our waist measurements, moobs and cankles, fractions are ballooning in size, also? Or will our sloppy wodge of adipose tissue flop over and cover Normandy and parts of Britanny as effectively?

By now, any person carrying far more than a handful of additional heft will be feeling cross or unhappy or at least aggrieved. Allow she who has no muffin leading cast the 1st creamy cronut and all that. Properly, speaking as one particular who has variously been as well massive and as well tiny and has recently taken up kick-boxing to slap my BMI into its rightful area, I know what I’m talking about.

It is not just about the strain on the well being service and the £50billion financial toll. It is a public heath crisis that ruins lives and demands to be tackled – like smoking – a single individual at a time. But how? Much more than 3 quarters of dad and mom (77 per cent) with obese or even obese youngsters presume, or at least assert, that they are perfectly healthy. Or at least the new normal.

In current instances, “acceptance” has been elevated to mankind’s highest virtue. This is totally appropriate, when it applies to these previously discriminated against owing to race, religion, disability, sexuality and yes, dimension. But enshrining equality ought not to preclude intervening when a person we care about is smoking or consuming, or in this instance consuming themselves into an early grave.

Most of us wouldn’t hesitate to mention, in a spirit of real concern, if a friend’s daughter was looking as well thin. But hand on heart, who between us would dare to level out that her son was too effectively upholstered?

There is a simplistic assumption that even mentioning fat problems will lead each teenager to swing like a pendulum in the direction of size zero starvation, which just is not borne out by the evidence. A lot more lives will be blighted by weight problems than anorexia.

Evolution, which programmes us to consume in times of lots, tends to make no allowance for the round-the-clock availability of cheap, fat, sugary, addictive foods. Our genetic lottery plays a function in storing unwanted fat, and even though desk-bound operating lives burn us out, they don’t burn calories – so it is all feast and no famine.

An overweight friend, gaily shedding pounds with the five:two diet program, mischievously suggests a classification of people’s size similar to that employed in the Paralympics: as a result, instead of employing the “fat” word, a series of letters and numbers would denote girth and so forth. I can not see even silver-tongued Nigel Farage getting that certain Brave New World notion to fly. But we do require to have a wise conversation, which signifies shelving the guilt trip and the defensiveness. And, no matter whether we like it or not, the chips, booze and chocolate.

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EMMA WATSON’S Demonstrate AND Inform REVEALS Far more THAN JUST HER KNICKERS

Emma Watson (above) would seem like a wonderful, sensible lady: no visible tattoos, shiny hair, insisted on finishing her degree so that she has a fall-back position if the total international stardom issue does not perform out.

But. Having bemoaned the lack of difficult, adult roles following her stint as Hermione in the Harry Potter series, the 23-yr-old has now tweeted a photograph of the entire contents of her make-up bag (such as her Commando Better Than Nothing knickers) like a hyperventilating teenage YouTuber.

Not that I’m complaining it proved an education to me at any fee. Tide instantaneous stain remover need to be in each woman’s armoury, Giorgio Armani skin flash radiance booster would transform the school run (even if my spangled Oscar de la Renta train does get caught in the vehicle door), and who knew Tom Ford created lipstick? Well, apart from A-Listers.

I really do not believe her motive was blatant solution placement – our Em has banked ample not to require freebies of dry shampoo – and it was plainly in the show-and-inform spirit of the age. But. It is not terribly Hedda Gabler now, is it?

Maybe Emma wants to accept she’s not really ready to put away childish things, which may well clarify why, for now, she keeps obtaining presented ingénue retreads.

It may well appear aggravating, but she’s in a unusual and covetable position for any actress actually looking forward to increasing older.

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JOANNE MILNE’S JOY OF SOUND

Who could fail to be moved by images of Joanne Milne, weeping with emotion as she heard sound for the very first time in her forty years of deafness?

Joanne, who was born without having hearing and then lost her vision in her twenties, obtained cochlear implants last month. This week they were ultimately switched on, and as a nurse recited the days of the week into her headphones, the charity employee broke down in tears at the sound of a human voice.

Joanne has because been launched to music – John Lennon’s Imagine was the initial track she listened to, followed by a compilation comprising a song from every 12 months since her birth, lovingly picked by her friends.

She is drunk on birdsong and traffic and the sound of lights getting switched on. Lord understands how she’ll cope when she stumbles upon the opening chords of Rhapsody in Blue or the 1st, exquisitely melancholy notes of Satie’s Gymnopédie No one.

But all these are so considerably background noise when in contrast to the sound of laughter and babies crying, idle chatter, cheering or merely whispered endearments.

It was Helen Keller who observed that while blindness separates folks from factors, deafness separates people from folks.

Following half a lifetime locked in silence, Joanne Milne has last but not least broken free of charge. Even to my jaded ears, the days of the week have never sounded sweeter.

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25 Many years Collectively IS NO JOKE

It’s April Fool’s day on Tuesday, when the newspapers will be positively chocca with wildly improbable stories about, oh, I do not know, David Cameron wresting key EU concessions from the Germans. Oh he has, has he? Gosh.

Anyway, the April one joke is technically supposed to put on off at midday, but at times it doesn’t.

At times, the giddy merriment lasts 25 years, which is how prolonged, because the very coup de foudre, my husband and I will have been with each other. And prior to you even contemplate undertaking the maths, let’s just say I was younger. Quite, really youthful.

Though we did not wed for more than a decade, I contemplate 1989 to be the crucible of shock and awe, as that was when I set about making an attempt to modify him.

My partner, on the other hand, claims that 2000 is 12 months zero, which is partly due to bloody-minded pedantry in excess of the date of our actual marriage vows, and partly a troubling reluctance to bankroll a solid silver filter for the dishwasher or what ever other gewgaw is customary to mark the date of domestic enslavement.

Over the past 25 many years, we’ve weathered the deaths of mother and father and the births of children, been painfully winded by life’s calamities and, just usually enough, lifted substantial on sudden thermals of utter joy.

So we really do not require to acquire one particular one more cripplingly pricey, tritely clear presents in order to express our really like and appreciation for 1 an additional. But, darling, if you are reading through this, I might have acquired you a small some thing. Just so you know.

Let"s not mince words - unwanted fat can be a death sentence