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  News from a Doctor on the front line:-
  
  I’m horrified at the effect lockdown is having, particularly on the poor. A young woman recently sat in my outpatients clinic and asked me to take her children away. She was calm and at first I thought she was joking. ‘Why?’ I asked. She simply couldn’t cope any more. Then, as she began to sob, she confessed she was worried she would end up killing them and then herself. ‘I love them so much,’ she repeated as she begged me to take them into care. You have to be pretty desperate to try to give your children away. She lived in two rooms, and shared a bathroom and kitchen with another family. One child had autism, the other had behavioural problems and developmental delay. She has no family in this country. Day in and day out she sat in the room while her children screamed and wailed. I sat blinking at her, literally speechless. There were no day centres, no drop-ins — all sacrificed in the rush to lock down. She hadn’t seen her social worker for months. In the pandemonium of the pandemic, her community mental health team had effectively shut up shop and left her without any support. Now they just phone her occasionally. How she has lasted this long I have no idea. It’s easy for people in big houses having Zoom cocktails with their family to claim they know what’s best and insist that restrictions are imposed which mean others go stark-staring mad.

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