A Conversation with God

For twenty-four years, Glendon Jackson built a career on competence, resilience, and service. Then, within the span of a single crisis, three institutions sworn to protect him - his NHS employer, his GP surgery, and his local council - failed him simultaneously. A Conversation with God: Three Battlefields is a disabled worker's testimony from the front lines of institutional betrayal, at work: how a request rontinurity of cared being in sind anoturioniahature of institutory, nanat his mothergs, once and of a faith tested, in the fire.

In my conversation with God, I am reminded that I must flee from worldly pursuits and actively pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. I must fight the good fight of faith, hold fast to the eternal life to which I was called, and make my good confession before many witnesses. This is the framework in which this testimony is offered, not as a complaint, but as a witness; not as victimhood, but as the voice of one who has walked through fire and emerged to bear testimony to what was real. This book, Three Battlefields, documents My Conversation with God through four years of institutional siege. It records my experiences from April 2021 to November 2025, grounded in the background provided by my mother in the prologue, the foundation of faith and resilience upon which my own journey rests. But this testimony is not merely personal reflection. It is a declaration of war against the systems that destroy the vulnerable, a roadmap for survival for those who will face similar circumstances, and a demand for accountability from institutions that have violated sacred duty. A CONVERSATION WITH GOD The Architecture of Destruction I am fighting a war on three simultaneous fronts. Each battlefield is staffed by institutions sworn to protect me. Each institution, instead of providing the protection its mandate demands, has systematically dismantled my life through what they call procedures, protocols, and proper channels. These bureaucratic terms, so neutral, so professional, are the language through which systemic violence operates. They obscure. They delay. They protect power while destroying the powerless. These are not three separate battles. I did not stumble from one institutional failure into another by accident or misfortune. These three institutions are not isolated in their dysfunction. Rather, what I have come to understand through documentation, through pattern recognition, and through the accumulation of evidence, is that these are chapters of a coordinated siege. Though I doubt the institutions involved recognise themselves as collaborators in my destruction, the effect of their simultaneous failure is indistinguishable from coordination. They fail individually. They fail collectively. And in their collective failure, they have created a perfect storm designed, whether by intention or through systemic indifference, to render a disabled person defenceless. The mathematics of institutional failure are simple but devastating: when three systems fail you simultaneously, the damage is not additive. It is exponential. One institution failing you is survivable. Two institutions failing in concert is catastrophic. But three institutions, employment, healthcare, and housing/social care, failing you at the same time, with each failure compounding the others, creates a cascade of crisis from which escape becomes nearly impossible. Each institution creates conditions for the next to act against you. Each delay in one system extends suffering across all three. Each institutional failure weaponises the others. The First Battlefield: Southgate NHS Foundation Trust The first battlefield is Southgate NHS Foundation Trust, my employer since April 2021. This is the ground where my professional identity, built over twenty-four years of nursing excellence, was systematically dismantled. I arrived at Southgate NHS Foundation Trust with credentials earned through commitment, training, and demonstrated competence. I was appointed as an Advanced Practitioner, a role that spoke to my expertise, my potential, and my value to the organisation. The early months seemed to validate this. My Personal Development Review (PDR) in March 2022, my yearly appraisal checkpoint, recorded a Green rating. The institution acknowledged my resilience, my capacity for planning and execution, my commitment to projects and goals, and my resourcefulness. Yet beneath this glowing appraisal, something else was happening. The stress was mounting. My disability symptoms were worsening. My sleep was becoming corroded by persistent insomnia. My ability to regulate my nervous system was being compromised by an environment designed, whether intentionally or through institutional discrimination, to destabilise me. I was crowned outside, crippled inside, carrying the professional title, performing the role, maintaining the appearance, while internally I was being dismantled. By October 2021, the hostility had become unmistakable. By May 2022, I was on stress-related sick leave. By August 2022, I had resigned. What happened in between was a masterclass in institutional violence: the exclusion from meetings, the removal of my office belongings without consent, the manufacturing of conflicts, the Just Culture Panel that pretended to evaluate fairness while actually protecting power, the stress risk assessment that was never conducted despite being mandated by law, and the Occupational Health process that became another bureaucratic checkpoint rather than genuine support. This is the machinery of employment discrimination. It operates through procedure. It hides behind administrative processes. It uses policy language to justify injustice. And when you resist, when you refuse silence, you are recast as a troublemaker, a character flaw rather than someone seeking accountability. The Second Battlefield: Riverbank Surgery The second battlefield is Riverbank Surgery, my general practice. A GP surgery is the location where a general practitioner (GP) provides primary healthcare services. This should have been a place of refuge, a site of healing. It should have been the institution where I could seek help for the physical and psychological manifestations of the stress I was experiencing at work. Instead, it became another arena of institutional failure. When I disclosed my disability, my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), my need for specialist oversight, and my requirement for continuity of care, the Riverbank Surgery did not respond with accommodation. Instead, they responded with gatekeeping. My referrals were delayed. My requests for health support were blocked. And when I became vulnerable, when I was in crisis, when I most needed healthcare support, I was deregistered. Cast out from the patient register without proper notice, without assessment of my need, and without any genuine attempt to understand the consequences of my loss of access to healthcare. The Riverbank Surgery failed me not through a single act of malice but through a pattern of gatekeeping and exclusion designed to manage their own workload at the cost of my health. They failed me at the moment I was most vulnerable, when my workplace was hostile, when my health was deteriorating, and when I most needed the safety net of continuing healthcare support. That safety net was withdrawn. The Third Battlefield: South Borough Council The third battlefield is South Borough Council, a local authority responsible not only for my employment as an Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) but also for housing and social care services. This institution was supposed to be my safety net. Instead, it became another site of institutional betrayal. I accepted the role of AMHP at South Borough Council expecting that a local authority would have systems in place to protect the wellbeing of its employees. I did not expect excellence. But I expected competence. I expected basic occupational health safeguards. I expected that when I was on stress-related sick leave, I would be referred to Occupational Health. I expected that a risk assessment would be conducted. I expected that I would have support in returning to work. None of this happened. And as my employment situation deteriorated, as my health crisis mounted, as I desperately needed housing support, I turned to the same institution in its capacity as housing authority and social care provider. But the housing support I needed was slow to materialise. The social care assessment that might have identified my escalating vulnerability took months, months during which my crisis deepened. The coordination between the local authority's various departments, employment, housing, and social care, never materialised. Each department acted as an independent entity, unaware of or indifferent to what the others were doing. The employment department did not inform the housing department that I was on half pay. The housing department did not prioritise my assessment. The social care department did not respond to referrals. The result was not three separate failures but a perfect storm: employment instability without housing security, housing instability without adequate social care, and across it all, no coordinated response to an individual in visible crisis. The Structural Failure That Masquerades as Procedure What these three institutions share is not necessarily malice. What they share is a structural inability or unwillingness to recognise that their failures are cumulative, that their procedural inertia compounds, and that their individual acts of omission and commission create a collective effect that is indistinguishable from deliberate harm. They fail individually. The Just Culture Panel fails to recognise discrimination. The Riverbank Surgery fails to provide healthcare. The housing authority fails to conduct assessments. These are individual failures, explicable through negligence, bureaucratic delay, and resource constraints. But they also fail collectively in ways that suggest coordination or, more troublingly, a negligence towards the human cost of their procedures. When the employment institution fails and simultaneously the healthcare institution fails and simultaneously the housing institution fails, all three failing at the moment when the individual is most vulnerable, the result cannot be explained as coincidence. It is the outcome of a system designed to protect institutions from accountability, not to protect people. And they fail most catastrophically in their inability to see me as a whole person whose needs cross their institutional boundaries. I am not an employment case file. I am not a Riverbank Surgery patient. I am not a housing application. I am a person whose employment crisis creates a health crisis, which creates a housing crisis. These are not separate problems amenable to separate institutional responses. These are symptoms of a single crisis: the destruction of a disabled person by institutions that were supposed to protect me. The Testimony That Follows This book documents what happened when I refused to accept institutional narratives. It records my decision to fight, not with violence, not with aggression, but with truth, documentation, and the relentless insistence on accountability. It traces the journey from April 2021, when I arrived at Southgate NHS Foundation Trust believing in institutions, to October 2025, when I stood outside all three institutions, having learned what institutions are capable of. Through eighteen chapters, each reflecting on a passage from Ecclesiastes, alternating between the New International Version and King James Version for emphasis, I trace the transformation that suffering creates when it is met not with silence but with witness. I document the pattern of discrimination. I name the actors. I cite the law. I build the case not for my own vindication, though vindication may someday come, but so that others will understand they are not alone, that the problem is not their capacity but the system's refusal to comply. This is my conversation with God in the midst of institutional siege. This is my making good confession before many witnesses. This is my fight, not against flesh and blood, but against the systems that destroy the vulnerable. And this is my testimony: I am still standing. I am still speaking. And I refuse to let institutions have the final word. The three battlefields are mapped. The testimony begins. Let the reader understand what institutions are capable of, what disabled workers endure, and what it costs to speak truth in the face of institutional power.