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Saturday 22 November 2008

The Spectator's notes

The Spectator's notes

Charles Moore on the events of the week

A recent inquest recorded the death of Genevieve Butler, a woman in her twenties who threw herself from the fourth-floor internal walkway of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. I have followed this terrible case because Genevieve’s parents are friends of ours. It raises many issues about the mishandling of mental health care too large to be discussed in a note here, but one smaller point should be made. When Genevieve, who was in a psychotic state, jumped, she was being taken outside to smoke, in accordance with the no-smoking policy which is now law. A great many mental patients like to smoke. If they are not allowed to do so, they become much more anxious and desperate. If they go outside to smoke, they will generally need supervision. This involves greater risk and is a waste of nursing time which could be avoided if they could smoke in designated indoor areas. There are other recent cases, I gather — e.g. a fall from a hospital window in west London and a stabbing of a nurse in Essex — where the smoking ban created extreme and avoidable strain. Smoking harms the body, we know, but can we be so absolutist when it comes to the troubles of the mind?

It is 20 years since the Great Storm, and people are rightly pointing out how much good it did for the environment. As Stephen Budiansky puts it, ‘The “normal” state of nature is not one of balance and repose; the “normal” state is to be recovering from the last disaster.’ It is the sudden shift of things which opens up new habitat — new light on a forest floor, a new niche in a rock, new movement caused by high winds or high seas. This being so, shouldn’t more attention be paid to the beneficial effects of climate change? This week I heard some Eskimo on the radio moaning, in the well-schooled terms of victim culture, about the threat to her people now that it is possible to get through the Northwest Passage, thanks, allegedly, to global warming. But surely the change will bring advantages as well as problems. All prophecies of climate doom assume no adaptation, either by the natural world or by human beings. But adaptation there will be: it is nature’s way.

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