News round-up: Clegg warns of ‘Prozac nation’

By Mithran Samuel on February 8, 2008 in Community Care

The top social care stories from today’s newspapers

Clegg warns of ‘Prozac nation’ Britain as pill-taking soars

Britain has become a “Prozac nation”, with the use of antidepressants spiralling out of control amid a crisis in mental health care, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, will warn today.
In a speech to the Guardian public services summit, Clegg will commit his party to a maximum 13-week wait for NHS treatment for mental health problems. If the NHS misses the target, the patient will be entitled to go private and make the health service pick up the bill, he will say.

Academies the new grammar schools: Adonis

Academies should become this generation’s grammar schools, offering disadvantaged bright children a “ladder” out of poverty, according to a schools minister.
The state-funded independent schools should seek to attract pupils from middle-class homes and consider setting quotas for the number of students from each ability group to ensure a mix of pupils, the minister for academies, Lord Adonis, said yesterday. Lord Adonis’s speech was seized on by anti-academy campaigners who said that setting up “quasi-grammar schools” would lead to a two-tier system of education

Our children tested to destruction

Primary school pupils have to deal with unprecedented levels of pressure as they face tests more frequently, at a younger age, and in more subjects than children from any other country, according to one of the biggest international education inquiries in decades.

The damning indictment of England’s primary education system, from the Cambridge University study, revealed that the country’s children are now the most tested in the world.

Eviction death

A 77-year-old man died after being forcibly evicted from his council home. Police officers and bailiffs arrived with a court order to rehouse the man in Hackney, East London, but he refused to let them in. He was found collapsed on the pavement 20 minutes after he was relocated to another flat, and later died in hospital. The Metropolitan Police directorate of professional standards is investigating.

Read this story in The Times today

Adult children at home ‘strain family life’

A generation of “boomerang” children who stay at home into adulthood is straining family life to breaking point, according to research by a parents’ charity.

Some are students who return to the nest after university, saddled with debt, but others are simply unable to leave and stay into their 30s.

Read more on this story in The Daily Telegraph today