Read Glenda’s substack here:
https://rmnglenda.substack.com/profile/posts
About the Author
Glenda O’Brien is a retired Registered Mental Health Nurse (RMN) with thirty years of experience spanning the full spectrum of mental health and general nursing services. Her clinical foundation began in Scotland as an Enrolled Nurse (EN) in general care and psychiatry, before she went on to qualify as an RMN through Liverpool John Moores University. Throughout her career, Glenda worked across acute admissions, forensic services, rehabilitation, dementia care, and day hospitals. She practiced extensively within Liverpool, later serving the community in Cumbria as a community care liaison nurse for the Upper Eden Valley mental health services, before a stroke sustained at work forced her retirement.
Glenda sits on the Socialist Health Association Central Council and is a member of its Mental Health Group. Living as an ambulant wheelchair user with several chronic health conditions, she has transitioned her clinical expertise into socialist writing and campaigning, focusing on disability equality, public healthcare preservation, and social justice.
She has been married to John O’Brien for nearly forty years. John is a retired welfare rights adviser and tribunal representative with decades of experience defending disabled people within the benefits system. John is also a wheelchair user. Together, they operate as a dedicated activist partnership. By combining Glenda’s psychiatric nursing background with John’s frontline legal welfare expertise, they target the precise intersections where state bureaucracy, poverty, and physical barriers actively damage mental and physical health.
Collaborating with political, community, railway, and social service groups, Glenda and John fight to dismantle the pervasive barriers that restrict disabled people. In solidarity with SHA principles, their work highlights how institutional failures—such as inaccessible public transport, hostile infrastructure, and convoluted welfare systems—are not just logistical inconveniences, but direct drivers of mental distress, isolation, and health inequality.
As a couple who enjoy travelling throughout the United Kingdom and Europe in their wheelchair-adapted van, they use their hands-on journeying to contrast progressive accessibility design against modern structural failures. Glenda merges this deep lived experience with professional expertise to challenge the societal exclusions that restrict freedom of movement. Her core mission is to empower service users, unify professionals across the medical and therapeutic fields, and help build a socialist society where true equality is established as a fundamental human right.
Read Glenda’s substack here:
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