I got another letter from my community mental health team today.

It appears they want me to fill in a questionnaire to help them re-shape mental health care with then UK. To me that sounds like a very noble undertaking and one I'd be very interested in getting involved in. The problem is before I do I want to see a single, simple condition fulfilled and the government would also like to see one condition fulfilled.

My condition is quite simple in that I, rather then a civil servant, want to be paid for the contribution I make. The governments condition is rather more complicated. They, to use their words, want me to disarm myself. In short they want me to stop this shockingly violent task of blogging.

They want me to stop this because blogging provides the mechanism I use to challenge the decisions the government makes based on the information I provide them with. Without this mechanism they would be free to play little tricks such as using any drugs I may or may not be on to minimise the effects of combat stress allowing them to extend the tours of duty of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, something which allows the generals and their political leaders to mitigate the effects that their poor strategy and leadership is having on those troops. They can also take my comments that people with mental health problems need structured recovery programs and use it as a justification for a welfare reform bill that mandates the mentally ill must get jobs. This is a policy that spits in the face of the principles of independent living and will have a dramatic and negative effect on the lives of thousands of people with mental health problems.

Why the government is having so much trouble meeting my condition is a total mystery to me but I'm sure the civil service will be able to provide an answer. Why I can't meet the governments condition is quite simple. If you provide the government with information without having any mechanism to control how they use that information you are not furthering society or helping your community escape the ghetto. You are simply allowing the entity that is holding society back to feast on your bones making the government stronger for the next time they want to inflict another war, another tax or another anti-terror bill on to your society.

I haven't decided if I'm going to return that questionnaire but as the people who sent it can't seem to grasp the basic principle of an either/or logic gate there seems little point trying to explain the finer points of the human condition to them.

On a related note I spoke to the Department of Work and Pensions today and they've confirmed that they have received my paper work and it is all in order. However they do seem to think that it will take them another three to six months to process that paper work. If I was a suspiciously minded person I would think that somebody was deliberately delaying the process in the hope that I would keep my nose clean while I'm waiting. Of course that tactic hasn't worked yet and I again did have to give them warning that the situation will not change until such a time as they change the situation. I just wish they'd be more open to discuss the matter because then they'd realise they don't have half the problems they think they do.