A collection of poetry that critically examines what passes for care within our community I tried to describe in an earlier collection, to be like John Clare, the many conditions and states of mental ill-health, especially with regard to old-fashioned asylums in their rural settings. Problems & Polemics, however, is intended to be my attempt to have a far more critical (sceptical) look at what passes for current mental health practice within 'the community'. Throughout the mental health field now, both with those diagnosed unwell and with their 'treatments', there are many disagreements over, and holes in, the reasoning processes of the professionals; purported 'cures' often being as illogical as the 'illnesses', the human fallibility of the professionals often at odds with the 'therapeutic environments' that they are supposed to maintain. And it is because of the disparate nature of mental health practice that I have found that poetry (or prose poetry if you'd prefer) conveys, in book form, far more accurately the fragmentary realities of the world of mental ill-health - carers & cared-for - rather than straightforward prose, with its temptations to argue a singular point of view,