A living life, a living death: Bessie Head's writing as a survival strategy.

This paper explores Bessie Head's writing as a survival strategy through which she transformed her lived experience into imaginative literature, giving meaning and purpose to a life under permanent threat from the dominant group first in South Africa and later in Botswana. This threat included the destructive effect of the many fixed labels imposed upon her including: a 'Coloured' woman, the daughter of a woman designated mad, an exile, a psychotic, a tragic black woman, and a Third World woman writer. Her endeavours to avoid and defeat such limited, static definitions produced work characterised by contradiction and paradox, through which she asserted her right to survive and determined, like Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather, to establish 'a living life' in place of the 'living death that a man could be born into' (Head 1989, 136). Through a combination of Head's personal letters and papers and her published work, it can be seen how her particular preoccupations and experiences including her life in exile, her beliefs about her origins, her relationship to her absent mother, her distress, her madness and her need for love and for work were transformed into writing which expresses not only the destructive circumstances of her life but also its life-affirming aspects. Her writing was also a means by which she could create identities to express the dangers she encountered from the all-pervasive power structures which influenced her life and her sense of self, as well as ways to transcend them, enabling her to say in the last years of her life 'I am no failure' (20.2.1986 KMM BHP).

Professionals' perceptions of the obstacles to education for people using mental health services.

OBJECTIVE: This article focuses on the preliminary findings of a research project investigating the barriers to participation in education for persons using mental health services. METHODS: A questionnaire was administered to 380 care coordinators in community health teams in the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust to elicit their views on three areas where possible obstacles may be encountered: physical and psychological barriers found at an individual level, and structural barriers at the service level. Seventy care coordinators, predominantly community psychiatric nurses, replied and reported the barriers they saw facing 140 service users, all of whom were diagnosed with a severe mental illness. RESULTS: Analysis of the physical and psychological obstacles indicated that fluctuating illness was the major barrier, with mobility the least problematic issue. The average number of substantial barriers faced by an individual was five. Lack of funding for courses was the biggest service-related obstacle, closely followed by lack of information and opportunities for education. Low expectations on the part of mental health practitioners were seen as the least important service-related issue. CONCLUSIONS: Recommendations for service development highlight the role of education in recovery from mental illness.

Infant vision screening predicts failures on motor and cognitive tests up to school age.

In a population-based infant vision screening programme, 5295 infants were screened and those with significant refractive errors were followed up. To assess the relationship between the development of vision and other domains, we report a longitudinal study comparing infants with significant hyperopia, identified at age 9 months ('hyperopes') with infants with normal refractions ('controls'). Children are included who completed at each age a broad set of visual, cognitive, motor and language measures taken over a series of follow-up visits up to age 5.5 years. Hyperopes performed significantly worse than controls on the Atkinson Battery of Child Development for Examining Functional Vision at 14 months and 3.5 years and the Henderson Movement Assessment Battery for Children at 3.5 and 5.5 years. The Griffiths Child Development Scales, MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and British Picture Vocabulary Scales showed no significant differences. Exclusion of those infants who became amblyopic and strabismic did not substantially alter these results, suggesting that the differences between groups were not a consequence of these disorders. These results indicate that early hyperopia is associated with a range of developmental deficits that persist at least to age 5.5 years. These effects are concentrated in visuocognitive and visuomotor domains rather than the linguistic domain.