A fair society? Fuck you conservatives. The tyranny rules!

When I think of ideals I think of the opposite also.

What if society considered what it could get out of a person or what we could use. What if it wasn't colour, race or disability with which I differentiated. What if my prejudice is what a lump of flesh could achieve?

Let's take the premise that i'd seen the film Trading Places and knew that our valuations of a persons potential were so subjective. Let's say I wanted the best meat to squish through the grinder of society. Fuck disability. I want the best slaves to make the engine I call society.

I don't care about the individual. Mental or not. Thick or dumb. I want to create the slaves which get the job done.

Fairness? Fuck it. I just want the best, regardless. I don't want some pretty blond I want to fuck. I don't want someone who is like me. I want the best, regardless.

I want the best.

Let the new profession be those who change society

They've always been mad. Those crazy individuals that walk where no sane person would. Those who sacrfice more than those rational types might, ever using their rational capabiilities to allow selfish deeds with the pretense their altruistic. Those who walk alone in the face of all consensus opinion with one desire.

Let the mad do what we've always been here to do. Society needs healers. It needs the very best. It needs the mad.

They call us ill but they used to define us in other ways. Just a quick look into the historu of civilisation can see that human behaviour used to be pathologised in a different way to psychiatry.

When I say pathologised I should mean "be made an illness" but with mental illness ithe meaning can apply to what religion did. It gave labels and explanations for people and behaviours. It was a different system of laws to crime, ones which could still suffer extreme punishment (no change there).

The mental health and psychiatric paradigm or idea is a Western idea invented when religion waned but there was no replacement for in scientifitc terms.

Medicine supposedly brought the ideals of the Industrial Age to the question, or problem, of the human condition.

Here's the bloody brilliant thing. It did, eventually. Even the old skool of critical psychiatry, bad boys like Szasz, and modern antipsychiatrists like Bentall compared psychiatry to astrology they had to be present to the fact (according to science) that psychiatry has taken this form of labelling and applied science to it well, eventually. They're done far better than the KKK with black people or the Church with gays by wrapping up this prejudice and hokem with science.

What's amazing is the application of scientific principles through the latter half of the twentieth century brought results. It didn't really, truly discover mental illnesses. That's just a temporary value judgement. They discover a system to predict life course in their time based on a cluster of behavioural or emotional symptoms which has a degree of reliability and validity more than astrology. Just a little more but enough to be called science.

But they didn't find real illnesses. They just called them that. They found people and society can create the factors which cause the negative effects of social disability. They also found without realising that it is society and people which cause the prognosis, which can be viewed biomedically but in so doing only sees a small part of the effect, but this biomedical basis of prognosis is essentially arbitary in a biomedical sense because as....well lots of things other than biology change the illness ceases to be or ceases to considered by doctors an illness.

What I'm talking about is pretty obvious and I'll briefly reiterate. You can apply the paradigm of illness to homosexuality but when society changes then the illness disappears. Not a fucking illness then.

Now the boring stuff out the way, boring for regular readers, let the interesting stuff begin.

The application found something. It found phenotypes. There are other names given to discovering types of human being. Psychopathology research seeks to discover the types of people who, in whatever time or culture of whatever other variable, do worse in life. They might die quicker, they may be excluded and do less well at work but only in the circumstances they're in, temporal circumstances.

They discovered certain behaviours and emotions caused other people to, intuitively, create the social disability. And society itself of course, the collective systems which are meant to ...well my view is society looks after every human being and treats us equally.

Psychiatry focuses on the individual because this is convenient and is in line with their traditionally biomedical construct. As the medical profession grows in power it seeks methods outside the true role of a healer in society: it seeks to change lifestyle.

Smoking cessation is an example but perhaps obesity is a better one. I'm not sure. I'm drunk.

Obesity is not an illness. It causes illness and it causes disability. It can be 'treated', i.e. it can be changed, but this is a change in the behaviours. When behaviour can't be controlled effectively (defined by EBM standards) doctors can resort to drugs or even physical treatments to 'treat' such as a gastric bypass which produce the desired result.

Medicine or applied medical thinking has applied science to the idea that some people live poorer quality lives because of who they are. The psychiatric movement considers this reason enough to change the individual. Those who really buy into the propaganda call it distress and use concepts which...well...they're just ways to normalise society based on the idea that suffering comes from you rather than society and people causing that misery.

There is, as yet, a nebulous and, in my opinion, unnamed concept. Society and people cause the illness. Any good doctor could see what needs to be healed. But then any good doctor would never use the term mental illness.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I've just written an email to cancel what I was going to do tonight. It
was a talk at the RSA about a fair society.

I'd really like to be there. It's the sort of thing I'm very close to.
The journey to London just seems so far. I'm still in my pjyamas and
can't be arsed to don the smart mask for today. I'd really like to be
there as an active participant in the debate.

And I could make it. That's the sad thing. I could have a shower and
summon up the energy to get out the house. I'll probably end up doing it
anyway doing my sad loser thing. I'll probably go for a long walk around
my area and get drunk on my own. Another boring end to another boring
day. Yesterday was fun thankfully.

I wish I had the energy to be there at that debate. I really hate
feeling like this at times and being like this. Such is this life. Thank
fuck for ways to escape it. Booze and drugs were invented for the
self-medicator.

Comparative evaluation and validation of single and dual frequency GPS observations

http://www.gisdevelopment.net/technology/gps/techgp0025b.htm

Introduction to the Global Positioning System for GIS and TRAVERSE

A link to an online book on GPS

http://www.cmtinc.com/gpsbook/

Disability and rectification of disability.

This piece is on the hierachy of disability in part but not necessarily. The idea is the difference between Caelic's disease and cancer as a disability, the idea that there are degrees of disability.

Mental ill health can carry the same levels of disability. "Can" is carefully used in this last sentence. Severe schizophrenia is devastating. Successful schizophrenia suffers experience levels of disability the likes of which no human should suffer. The same as physical disabilities.

It can not too. Mental ill health can be a milder disability. The social outcomes are far less for a common mental disorder, something akin to what's described by the distress continum. Real disability shatters lives. Great men and women, in whatever field, can be exploited for the 'weatlth' they can provide so escape the prognosis like the blind people who've succeeded in life.

Society wants those minds which fit within society's norms. The same as the problem of body. I'm not speaking of the fashion industry. I'm talking of any industry which disables a person without recourse to their specific disability.

Let's take a silly example. The legless in the military. What point is their in that sort of human? Well to the military nothing. They are baggage. Except their not.

Fuck it. This is a rubbish rant. I want to delete this. So I publish it.

A little bit about me and my journey

I've had 3 hospitalisations since I was 25 and would have had another
one but managed to survive without being seen by services.

Psychosis itself is confusing and lifechanging. Sadly with the
psychiatric model of care it's usually something which changes life for
the worse. I have a hope that it can be something which changes people
for the better, eventually.

On my 25th birthday I was hospitalised for the first time. I was a
couple of months into working at Capital One, then one of the best
places to work in the UK and the world. I was at the start of an amazing
career and I hoped to become a corporate success.

I was paranoid during that time. My diagnosis was bipolar with paranoid
features. Even once I left hospital I the paranoia didn't stop. I didn't
want to be in the hospital and did everything I could to get out so I
think they just had to give in. I returned home to London and didn't
work for a year. I wasn't on benefits. Just lived off a loan I'd taken
out when I was manic and from the money I made from my corporate job.

I saw a private psychiatrist that year and for a couple of years after.
He was the one that drugged me to the eyeballs. The problem was I
continued to smoke skunk and I wasn't absorbing the drugs. I was very
unhappy. My dreams had been shattered. Worst of all I had this
diagnosis, a diagnosis of madness. I had a lot of self-stigma.

My first job after that was distributing leaflets telling people when
their rubbish would be collected. I had a degree in Electronic
Engineering, had programmed for a European Space Agency project when I
was 18 and been recruited to one of 10 places on Capital One's grad
scheme from 4,000 applications. With my diagnosis I thought all I was
good for was that level of work.

My next job was as a very basic admin job. I sorted the post out every
day at a council. They moved me to another department, Children's
Services. I'd in a children's home and a foster home briefly when I was
a kid. They didn't know that though. I was paid less than an 18 year old
temp doing an admin job while the work that I was doing was pretty high
level - a lot of what I was doing my boss should have been doing. I was
too depressed to care.

Two years of that job did help my esteem blossom. I worked very hard. I
worked outside work when I wasn't drinking and sometimes I'd work while
I was drinking. It's when I started that pattern. I was exploited, never
rewarded appropriately for the level of my work. Ecentually an
opportunity came up but my boss was my friend and the only way to take
that opportunity was to take her job. I'd been encouraged to apply by
the management team who'd seen my dedication and the results I could
achieve within the constraints.

The year I programmed for the European Space Agency was part of a scheme
for budding entrepreneurs and "captains of industry in 20 years time"
but I didn't feel like that. I felt like a mad person, someone
who...well...was mad. It was something I hated and I asusmed my life
outcomes would be worse because of it. I was partially right in a sense.
I didn't really have the aggressive streak required by entrepreneurs. I
was very passive when I worked that job but that's because I was drugged
to the eyeballs with a chemical cosh.

I never felt angry at being mistreated or underpaid. I didn't care. I
didn't really care much about anything. That's really the effect of
antipsychotics. For many people they don't stop psychosis. I wasn't even
experiencing psychosis at the time but the risk of an episode meant I
was told I would be on these medications for life.

In a series of stupid circumstances I quit that job. It was all I had to
live for. I became very depressed. I drank continuously. Didn't care.
Just wanted to die and while I was alive it was better being drunk. An
opportunity arose through a contact of mine to provide input for a new
magazine. In the end I decided to sod it all and have a go at this
magazine. This wasn't a single decision but a series of steps.

I took out huge loans and spent money wildly. I didn't care. I'd made an
internal decision. If things didn't work out I'd just take my life. If
things did work out I'd take my life anyway. I told no one about this
decision of course. Anyone who's been suicidal knows that's the usual
practice. Obviously I didn't tell my psychiatrist. I didn't trust him.

In the end the magazine didn't work out and the money ran out. One
evening I took an overdose. I remember changing my mind and trying to
sick it up just once. Then I got over it and lay down to die. I remember
waking up the next day thinking, "shit. I'm alive." A week later I tried
again but it was a very different way. I was drunk and angry and had
snapped. I cut myself in front of someone, burned all my medication and
took what was left of them in another overdose. My family got an
ambulance and I think they called the police too. They handcuffed me
which was totally unnecessary.

I was in hospital for a couple of days, Accident and Emergency, while
they monitored me. I said I was fine but they wanted to make sure. Then
some social workers came in and said my parents didn't want me to return
home. I'd been through that before when I was a child. I wasn't
bothered. I didn't know what I was going to do but I didn't care.

They housed me in a psychiatric ward for a few weeks. I think they
weren't sure if I was going to attempt again. People who are suicidal
need to be good liars at times if they're going to make another attempt.
It's what anyone would do if they wanted to take their own life.

I ended up in temporary accommodation. My life was in tatters. I was on
a meagre income. I learned to yellow sticker shop to survive. That's
what I called the feeling of scanning the shelves looking for bargains
and rummaging through the reduced price food which is almost mouldy. In
fact sometimes it had gone off but it didn't matter. It's the only way I
could eat nice food.

At that point I came off everything. Drink. Drugs. Psychiatric
medication. If anyone has found it hard coming off antidepressants or
stopping smoking then they've got no frame of reference to how hard that
period was. I had no support. I was alone with the comedown from all of
that as well as what I perceived as the shattering of my life. The only
support I got from the NHS was my CPN during that time though after a
while I managed to get a referral to a drugs and alcohol counselling
service. Clearly someone in Brent had read the government's dual
diagnosis strategy. I don't think that's happened in other boroughs.

I've had a few crises in my life but this time in retrospect was one of
the worse. I had virtually nothing when I moved into that room. A few
books. I couldn't even afford new ones. I read fast so I decided the
most cost effective way to escape from the withdrawal from all those
medications was to play Sudoku. Endless hours of Sudoku day after day.

There is a saying about champagne and lager or something. Once you get
used to champagne lager is never the same. My life had gone from a high
social status with a good quality of life crashing down to the doldrums
of poverty and isolation. It has happened so many times in my life it's
really quite horrible to think of it happening to anyone else but me.

This is the pattern of my life, the cycle. This is my personal journey
and one I have to face, often alone. There is no acceptable solution and
I've sought one. I've sought many. I will keep searching but in all
honest I doubt I will find anything else but the final solution which,
in my meaning, is an assisted suicide.

For others I hope they find their own solution is better than mine. If
it's psychiatry, spirituality, hedonism or any other way then that's
great. I would want no one to live my life and I'd fight for you to have
the opportunity never to experience what I've been through.

I know the social disability in and out. I know the distress and the
suffering and the endless pain. I've got more personal experience to
inform my views than any psychiatrist or politician.

I live the sort of life which leads to a reduced life expectancy. I do
it by choice as a passive way to kill myself as well as a side effect of
the other things I want in my life apart from death (my own, not anyone
else's).

I've taken you to a point in my life four or five years ago. The last
few years have been even more intense in some ways. Highs and lows. But
I'll leave it there for now.

Facts about smoking: a lot of people do it; Facts about mental distress: a lot of people feel it.

I just read something which made me smile in a sort of "I'm so fucking tired I can't even be arsed to be annoyed" sort of way (a unique response perhaps...or even a sign of pathology to some cunt psychiatrist).

"
Almost half of total tobacco consumption and smoking-related deaths occur in people who experience mental distress
"

Well of course. If 1 in 4 people in a year experience mental distress then how many do you think experience it in a lifetime? Easily half perhaps? That's what the only study I've seen which attempted to estimate this said.

What may be true is that the mentally ill have continued to keep smoking while the automotons, those who are docile sheep and do what they're told, have stopped more often.

What may also be true is that the mentally ill are as smart as the smartest psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies. The neurotransmitter norepinephrine is released by tobacco smoking. It is also the one which drugs like sodium venlaflaxine, the best pharmacological option for treatment resistant depression, also uses this neurotransmitter to achieve it's effect. It's been guessed that people with schizophrenia smoke to help deal with the negative symptoms of the supposed illness. People are self-medicating. They're healing themselves better than physicians could. The problem is they only have access to cigarettes, alcohol and illegal drugs. The same as everyone else. They don't use research. They use a higher quality of evidence. What works for them.

For fucks sake. Legalise drugs so people can get access to safe versions of these forms of self-medication.

--  Don't let justice be the privilege of the elite. Support the Justice for All campaign http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/

Government policy gets my goat

They're interested in enforcing their views on the public. I favour
something else. Rather than the tyranny of the healthcare bourgeois I
want the democracy of the people, the people who use the services.

This top down vision stuff is very Anglophonic thinking. It's a hangover
from the monarchy or something. The princes of commissioning lay down
directives with little knowledge of what it's like.

No mental health commission by people with no lived experience,
preferably the lived experience of what they're trying to treat.

New ways to modify behaviour (and perhaps get high)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003511
Remote Excitation of Neuronal Circuits Using Low-Intensity,
Low-Frequency Ultrasound

This is about a technique for changing neural activity which is better
than current non-invasive techniques used in psychiatry such as deep
brain stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The research by the lead author is being funded by the US military. It's
not actually for mind control weapons. They've already got lots of stuff
for that. It's for new ways to interface with information and electronic
warfare systems. William Tyler has recently cofounded a company to bring
this technology to the market called SynSonic just recently so it's
something we may be seeing in devices in twenty to third years.

It will become something which psychiatrists start using much quicker if
given the opportunity. Any new weapon in their armentarium of
behavioural modification tools is put to use as quick as possible, and
even without the evidence that it works. It seems this particular
technology could be quickly brought to clinical trials stage since it is
based on established behaviour control technology.

I'm always careful to call it behavioural control rather than healthcare
which is what the authrs of the research paper probably think they're
exploring.

I imagine in a parallel universe where just one thing had happened
different this same paper would be on the application of this technique
to make homosexuals not mentally ill or subdue those pesky black slaves
who kept on running away. Those are problems which have fuck all to do
with medicine, the ethics of medicine or the paradigm of healthcare.

It's bad enough that the medical profession has been bastardised into
psychiatry. I imagine there are certain charities right now who might
see this new behavioural modification technology to be the solution for
mental distress or well being.

There's also a part of me which thinks this technology could mean there
will be amazing new ways to get high in the future. After all, the
majority of mental health treatments are little different to effects
provided by illegal drugs. Herbal cannabis is like an antipsychotic.
Binge drinking can be good for depression. Antidepressants aren't a bad
high but there are better ones available illegally.

Perhaps there will become a black market for these sort of devices to
induce pleasure as well as remove certain behaviours, or both. The new
opiate for the masses might be a headset device which can trigger any
number of neurochemical reactions to get people higher than they've ever
been before and safer while doing it.

--
Don't let justice be the privilege of the elite. Support the Justice for All campaign
http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/

Dating anxiety

I don't know how people date. It stresses me out just thinking about it.

I have a strict rule. I don't date. I'm happy to go out with a girl as
friends. But a date? Woah. That's just crazy talk.

I wouldn't know what to do. Dating to me feels like I'd have to be
someone. I'd have to be impressive or suave or cool or something like
that. I wouldn't know how to do any of that. I feel like I'd have to
pretend to be someone to impress the girl.

Instead I go on non-dates. I meet a person as a friend. Often I
deliberately do something to make sure it's not a proper date, for
example I might dress badly or something. It try to make it as much like
two friends meeting up as possible.

I admit I'm not perfect at it. I do make an effort for a lady I like. I
do have feelings of lust and hopes that I might get laid, except that
never happens on first contact anyway because of my self-harm scars.

On these non-dates - some of which the other person hasn't realised they
weren't dates - am myself. It may not be perfect but it's surprising how
successful I've been. I've got lots of tales of women who've wanted to
sleep with me. I rarely tell the lads the truth that I can't take them
up on the opportunity, not until I trust them to be able to handle
seeing my vicious self-harm scars.

A couple of years ago I was going out with this great girl. We were
passionate and it was an intense relationship. It was a lot of fun too.
For the first few times we were together I avoided coming back to hers
and I think she thought I was gay but repressing it. In fact I just
didn't know what to do about my scars. I've self-harmed on an off for
most of my adult life. The scars were slight but I saw them as really
bad. The year before I met her I went through one of the worst
experiences of my life, an experience which conveys little meaning when
it's described as "psychosis", and during this period I was self-harming
prolifically. My left forearm looks like....well it looks almost
diseased until you look up close and see that the cuts -upon cuts are
things I've done to myself in my battle against the entity in my life.
The first night we were going to sleep together I showed her my scars.
She freaked out and threw me out.

So these non-dates don't usually have a purpose for me other than
friendship anyway. After all, I'm going to kill myself one day. There's
really no point in having a relationship. It would only mean I'd hurt
the other person when I finally succeed in taking my life.

I assume everyone has dating anxiety but when I see other people on
dates they seem so sure of themselves. I'm sure I seem sure of myself
but the reason is I'm not on a date. Perhaps it's just the
attractiveness which confidence brings, a confidence I create by not
being on a date nor trying to impress a woman. I'm lucky that I feel
comfortable joking with women about things like the research on sex and
mental health or the bawdy chatup lines I know. It means I'm usually the
best or the worst date ever.

The self-harm scars...welll they're not something that many people have
to deal with. I admit I used to have a semi-patholigcal inadequacy
because I've got a small penis but I've grown out of that. I'm sure many
psychologists could say a lot about that. I think ...hmmm....what would
be the psychiatric disorder....probably body dysmorphic disorder or
penis dysmorphic disorder....is more common than people are aware of.

I think most people deal with their dating anxiety with alcohol. It's
the best thing. It also helps with other things which make it useful on
a date. Sex. I'm talking about sex.

Some comments from a response on a mental healthcare program for disaster affected countries

I've just spent most of today working on a response to something a friend of mine sent me. It's for a mental healthcare support programme for third world countries affected by disasters such as floods. I won't give more specifics other than to say it's a good idea in principle. The problem is what mental healthcare actually represents, especially in cultures which have better informal mental healthcare through religion and without the problems of post-Industrial age malformations in society.

This is why I have no life. All I do is work and drink. I don't even get paid for this and it means I have do do more work at the weekend. It's my choice though. No matter how bad this depression is or how painful the misery and isolation it means I can get a lot done. I read a lot and that's how I know a fair bit amount mental healthcare, enough to know that I'm a wreck. C'est la vie. The school of hard knocks taught me well. Misery just is. It's part of life and an important part. It's not for everyone though and I'd want no one else to live the life that I lead. It'll kill them.

Sadly this response is the last thing the project will want to hear. This is the problem with a lot of my consultation. I've asked my friend to soften the blow, which is basically me saying this lovely project to help people suffer less after a disaster runs the risk of just spreading a Western ideal which hasn't really proved successful in providing better outcomes and may cause the worse outcomes by calling it mental health and mental illness. Empowering local systems might be a better idea but this isn't the point of the project... It will be interesting to see the response to my response.

Anyway, here are some snips from the response.

Cultural awareness is important. Basically mental illness is a Western concept and a construct rather than a real illness. Post industrial age developed world society shifted significantly and created the forms of exclusion which meant that the mad would, for example, be put on ships and cast out to sea to drift to the next town or die. In a great act of compassion the old leper houses became the homes of the severely mentally ill where they could be kept and looked after. Then psychiatry was invented. The 'illness' is the prognosis of poor outcomes in life but those are a problem caused by a society and people who disadvantage people who are different.

Other countries didn't have this same process though the more Westernised countries (/developed world nations) in the East are getting into the dogma of psychiatric thinking. And perhaps the outcomes will be as poor there as they are in the West, because certainly for schizophrenia people do better in developing world nations without mental healthcare systems. The factors of exclusion and poorer social outcomes are less harmful in these nations and happen less in my opinion.

Religion was the dogma before and as it waned in the West so did the function it provided, for example community through the church, an explanation for suffering or unusual behaviour and confession as a form of psychological therapy.

I think religion still has a lot of power in Pakistan. There is the option to support the Islamic religious organisations to do what they do better as well as bring in the white man's new religion (sorry. This might be inappropriate language but I feel it makes the point rather well. You can edit it).

It may also be worth considering how the Muslim religion considers these events. I assume they've spoken to local Imams - think that's what the priests are called. Anyway, using the psychiatric dogma, even if it's one based on a psychosocial paradigm, may not be as effective as using the dogma which the culture already uses. If people start going around saying "depression....seee a doctor" rather than saying "really unhappy....how can I help them" then this causes poorer outcomes and is one of the root causes of the problems of mental illness in the West in my opinion, one which I'm happy to elaborate upon with a pint in my hand. I see that one of the goals is building community but this isn't achieve when the community start considering misery is an illness and individuals should see a doctor to resolve it. It's an ill society which thinks like that.

Just one more example o how religion does what mental health does. I studied Islam at GCSE and was amazed to find out that some Islamic cultures dictate that after death (perhaps this is only women but maybe men too) people must grieve properly for a month. They must shout and wail and cry - essentially act out - for a solid month to get it all out. Everyone supports them during this time. After a month that's it. Just get on with life after that. Psychiatry on the other hand makes an exclusion for grief in the diagnostic criteria for depression. It is 6 months of experiencing the symptoms of depression before it can be called depression if the trigger is a death - and really then it's sort of an adjustment disorder but I really don't know a lot about those or the differentiation. (In practice I'm sure doctors do offer grief counselling before 6 months but they'd be very unlikely to prescribe antidepressants during that period).

For example dance therapy might be more culturally appropriate. There is a sub-culture in Islam which dances...not sure if that's in Pakistan though.. They spin around and stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJIofU-0jC0

This is sort of inline with the cultural sensitivity point but this is about psychiatry itself. People in different countries present with different symptoms to those in the West. It's already observed that the Western symptoms underrocgnise male depression and the diagnostic criteria for depression is also fundamentally biased against male expression of subjective unwellness (studies show that men and women roughly equally say the feel bad but as the psychiatric diagnostic cluster of symptoms is added men get their misery underrecognised more than women do).

My fave example of this problem is how the diagnosis of anorexia in Hong Kong changed after a media story. A girl dropped dead in the street with anorexia so the journalists went online to get diagnosis information. They'd have got the information from the stuff in Wiki which is based on DSM or from other sources which might use ICD. In fact local psychiatrists didn't diagnose people using either criteria. They knew from their clinical experience that people present with totally different symptoms. None of the journalists contacted the girls psychiatrist to understand what were her specific symptoms. What's extraordinary is after the media story local psychiatrists found people presenting with Westernised symptoms.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

So this rather lengthy point is about training people to recognise local symptoms. This means involving local psychiatrists. There's little point in training people to recognise Western symptoms if they people there present with different externalisations of misery or have different cultural values. It may also be inappropriate to pathologise a woman wailing after her husband's death as depression when the culture understands that it's their way to express it.

Technology
There's a key problem with natural disasters and healthcare: the telecommunication network goes down. When a disaster happens the network which is being built may not be able to communicate.

There's this professor geezer. Crazy genius type. He's developing a shoe phone. That's not what we're interested in though. He's also developing telecoms solutions for disasters. One of them is mobile phone masts that can be parachuted in to create a temporary local mobile network. The smartphone is the other bit of clever tech. He's written this bit of code which means that smartphones with wireless can create a mesh communication network - essentially the network is created through the phones acting as masts for each other. The project is called Serval - http://www.servalproject.org/ and the shoe phone can be found here - http://realshoephone.com/

Regardless of this possibility the problems of telecoms going down during a natural disaster need to be considered. There may be a simpler solution, for example long wave radio, which already works. These would add to the cost of the project but imagine what happens in a natural disaster when the network of trained quasi-therapists have ways which people can still communicate. People will come to them to use the radio or walkie talkie or whatever communication tech they have and this creates the opportunity for people to come to get mental healthcare. In a disaster people go to get food and water and medicine. Those are the essentials. The next step is finding out about their loved ones. Their concern isn't usually to go see a therapist. You can finish off the logic for this one yourself. It will significantly increases costs of course but it delivers two positives: the network of quasi-therapist can still communicate after a disaster and the people affected will actively access the network which provides the mental healthcare. Otherwise I don't think they'll bother. It's just practical and stuff.

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Interesting New Scientist article

This is a pretty good piece on what's becoming available for the police. Total Robocop stuff.

-- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20153-augmented-reality-iphone-helps-police-track-suspects.html  " 
PICTURE the scene: armed police officers are warned on their radios that a suspected male terrorist has been tracked to a crowded football stadium. Even with a full description, it's all but impossible to pick him out amid the match-day melee. Perhaps smartphones fed augmented reality (AR) data by the police control centre could help focus the search.
After booting up an iPhone app, an officer would train the phone's camera on the crowd. The suspect's position, after he had been tracked by covert police, would be highlighted by an icon overlaid on the image. Similarly, other icons could pinpoint the positions and range of other officers (see picture), including those operating undercover.
The system, called iAPLS, has been developed by engineers at Frequentis, a surveillance-systems company based in Vienna, Austria. It is a mobile extension of the firm's Automatic Personal Location System, which shows the location of officers on control-room screens using GPS signals sent by their radios. If a suspect has a cellphone that police have a fix on, or they are being closely followed by a covert officer, they too can be tracked. Officers can also use their ph one to "tag" the location of a suspect package to make it visible to fellow law enforcers.
What Frequentis engineer Reinard van Loo and his colleagues have done is package APLS data so that it can be sent via a regular 3G link to a standard iPhone, making location information available to all officers on duty, not just those in the control room.
The extra data that this kind of AR app will provide could be a double-edged sword, warns David Sloggett, a security researcher at the University of Reading, UK. "Terrorists have been very good at turning our own technology against us. The Mumbai attacks [in India in 2008] were meticulously planned on Google Earth, for instance. If terrorists get hold of police location data on mobile phon es it could be disastrous."
Stopping criminals hijacking AR data will require strongly encrypted data links. While the Frequentis demonstration system used a regular 3G network, van Loo says that by the time it is commercialised it could be using an encrypted emergency-services-only 4G network - known as LTE for Public Safety.
Pauline Neville-Jones, the UK's Home Office minister for security and counterterrorism, believes AR could be a game-changing technology for the police and the military and so has commissioned Log ica, a Reading-based technology company, to carry out 12 months of tests against what she calls "realistic security threats" using a range of AR systems at the University of Nottingham. "We want to know how effective augmented reality can actually be in helping us fight threats," she says.
The AR offerings include visors that overlay data on an officer's field of view. For instance, BAE Systems in Rochester, Kent, is re-engineering a visor it makes for helicopter gunships – in addition to projecting a green glow around human targets sensed via infrared camera, it will also display the kind of data Fre quentis is generating. And Trivisio of Kaiserslautern, Germany, is using miniature accelerometers similar to those found in cellphones to make an ultra-lightweight visor that tracks head motion with high accuracy, says spokesman Gerrit Spaas.
For police officers tracking targets via helicopter, Churchill Navigation of Boulder, Colorado, is augmenting liv e helicopter video with terrain-contoured street maps in real time. Without this, says founder Tom Churchill, it is hard for pilots looking at a maze of streets on screen to know which street a target is in. It works by tightly coupling the map database to the software that controls the camera's motion.
Meanwhile, James Srinivasan and his colleagues at 2d3 in Oxford, UK, are working on a system that ensures search teams cover all the ground when searching for improvised explosive devices – whether that's in a shopping mall or on a dirt track in Afghanistan. Twin cameras trained on the search team allow the s ystem to generate computer images of the paths they have trodden, which are then overlaid on the video feed, allowing an operator to spots areas they have missed. "    Don't let justice be the privilege of the elite. Support the Justice for All campaign http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/

Here's a fucking vision

We are born equal or die equal.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Same thing said by religion and an
observance of truth, one that I hope the likes of Jeff Foster could respect.

What happens between the moment of our inception and the moment of our
death. It is not a truth in the sense it is a constant.

We are all born equal. We all die equal. What happens to use inbetween
is equal.

That's a fucking vision. Go fuck your SMART objectives. Go grow a pair
of balls. That's what it takes to achieve.

Equality in life. It's described by the social model of disablity, or
lack thereof. It is understood by ideas like the mortality gap between
rich and poor, an ever-widening one which I'm hugely biased towards
stopping. The disability of reduced life expectancy is something I'm all
for reducing, just not at the cost of liberty or the extinction of
phenotypes (or in fact individual ways of existence).

There are real crimes and natural law. There is real mental
illness...which I've yet to find....and there's mental disorder and
there's crime and a bunch of other stuff. Fucking nebulous shit. My new
favourite word. Means can't be fucking arsed to define with any
elegance. I'm tempted to offer my chocolate salty balls out at this point.

Here's the vision. Equality. That's it. That's our society. Fuck.
Wouldn't that be awesome. Stoner logic I guess but it makes sense to me.
But there's death and murder and illness and reduced life expectancy
based upon lifestyle factors or behaviours which are judged abnormal by
an abnormal society.

Come hither to the argument, one I'll drunkenly and highly explain.
Collective groups of people with power, or the significant "tribe"
within society or the prevailing consensus group or whatever else, can
find ways and methods of describing another group of people (please
excuse the language coming up. It's from the book 1984 by George Orwell)
as less equal than someone else.

Those methods, such as doublespeak as was the term used in the book, can
achieve great ends. His book was written with a sense of malevolence
behind the action. I quote Hanlon's Razor: stupidity, or incompetence,
before malice.

--
Don't let justice be the privilege of the elite. Support the Justice for All campaign
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Man: the mental illness

Bentall has done this better than me in his paper on happiness as a mental disorder. He's done what any critical psychiatrists would do, or any antipsychiatrist as they used to be known.

In the paper he applies the techniques of psychiatry and the tricks of research to expose the facile nature of diagnosis. I admit he's not quite hit the nail on the head. He's using this example of happiness pathologised to make the point about the ease with which the science of mental health can be applied to pathologise whatever. We all know happiness is what we want and perhaps this psychological element is what's behind the subtlety of what he's saying and so I'll attempt to replicate it.

Men. So mentally disordered. Responsible for the most murders. And crime. They have some neurobiological differences. They could be considered mental illnesses and responsible for their behaviour. It could be said that 75% of men successfully kill themselves and this is a result of the mental illness of being a man. Oh the distress. And it's not even recognised either. In the UK they're referred to secondary mental health services 20% less than women. They suffer so much and it's not even recognised.

Men...I mean people with a diagnosis of being a man...don't recognise their own illness and what impact it has. About 50% of the illness is present in the population. This epidemic must be stopped. We need funding to have the government take action. It's not about the risk of death from the mentally ill diagnosed with masculinity. The risk is small. The risk of them killing themselves, drug addiction or shorter life expectancy is what we need to fix.

We need not just funding for medication. We need funding for behavioural modification. We need men to become women...I mean normal.

Please, please help these people who've got a disability. They don't live as long, they are so distressed they successfully kill themselves more and they're murderers. Most murders and most wars were started by men.

Disregard all the evidence and go with your heart. Men are mentally ill and we need your support to make them like women...I mean heal them and make them normal again.

I do like a nice rant now and then.

The use of the paradigm of medicine, language and the capability to make behavioural control without process acceptable

This is the result of the chaos of definition of mental disorder.

I often use the term schizophrenic or manic depressive except when I'm dealing with people in authority.

I hate having to use any other labels. Schizophrenics and manic depressives are a phenotype expressed from a genotype, most likely. They're things and they're people but they're not diseases. The noun is appropriate and correct.

Some may consider me insenstive but I'm not. I care deeply for my people. I am passionate and fight tooth and nail for them. We are the oppressed.

One of the tools of oppression is the idea that it's an illness. We all know that illnesses are treated by doctors to remove them. That's real illness anyway to which the paradigm of medicine can be applied.

Mental illness is well evidenced using the paradigm. There's evidence of biological differences and hereditary predispositions for homosexuals.

Oh shit. They're not mentally ill any more. Some doctors finally listen and decided this thing which fits the paradigm of illness is not longer an illness.

Oh. No. Wait. I'm still making a point. The gay or the homosexual is someone who's a thing and nouns are used. They're not people with an illness diagnosed as homosexuality. They're not free black people put in a situation where they're slaves and their insanity is running away from their subjugation (the mental illness know as drapteomania).

We are a type of person, one which was rejected by society and it's values of normality and acceptable behaviour. Psychiatry simply applied biomedical thinking to a social problem. The masses, amazed by science, came to understand it was an illness because they were told it was when, in truth, it isn't.

In medical textbooks mental illnesses are referred to as behavioural and emotional disorders. In older literature the use of nouns is common.

Today it isn't, at least what the public read. The read about distress and mental health problems because the politically correct movement have chosen to change the language because they never understood the concept. They confused psychopathology with distress. They confused illness with a social problem. And they were very effective in what they did: propaganda.

The soft language deemed acceptable today reinforces the psychiatric hegemony and inadvertently misappropriates what is a nebulous concept, mental health, which has been a signifcant endeavour to me to make, for want of a better word, non-nebulous.

What I mean is they've shifted the concept which everyone has, with all the best intent in the world, but allowed psychiatry's power to become even stronger.

They've made it even more acceptable to change. The paradigm of medicine is almost as powerful as the paradigm of happiness or capacity to enforce behavioural, social and cultural norms which fall outside the remit of either crime or healthcare.

Just think of the symptoms and diagnoses which are no longer mental illness or not diagnosed as mental illness.

Better yet. Get your head around Foucault's Madness and Civilisation. The whole thing's a fucking construct which was created because society rejected difference.

Then you'll begin to understand that it isn't an illness, it doesn't need to be 'treated' in the individual and the individuals themselves have a right to exist as they are. That's a fucking human right the Human Rights Act takes away and gives no protections for.

All because of confusion in language and true concepts.

Sex, art and schizophrenia

This old chestnut has been around a long time. In modern times more sexual partners is a good thing or it's more acceptable than it was 100 years ago. It was one of the Kennedy family in the US who was given ECT for her schizophrenia but her 'disease' was a social one where the presidential family didn't want any of their members bringing their reputation down with their promiscuity.

The article Sexual Success And The Schizoid Factor specifically talks about schizoptypy traits rather than pathological schizophrenia. It's a pretty good article.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/creativity.shtml

"

Ever wondered why uncouth, scruffy rock musicians are pursued by legions of doting, lovelorn female fans? Or why women threw themselves at Pablo Picasso? Well, a new study suggests that creativity may confer an evolutionary advantage in finding a mate; indicating that creative types haveincreased sexual appeal. But paradoxically, people who have certain traits predictive of schizophrenia - a condition not normally associated with evolutionary fitness - also have a higher propensity toward artistic ability. This creative ability, say some evolutionary experts, is far from being a disadvantage, as creativity is highly attractive when it comes to mate choice.

Like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller considers sexual selection to be right up there in importance with natural selection. Advocates of sexual selection argue that competition between members of the same sex drives the evolution of particular traits that mates of the opposite sex find attractive. Miller, author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, claims that traits like morality, art, language and creativity, influence the way in which the human mind evolves. It may sound like a stretch, but recent studies show that reliable predictions of mate choice can be made using these kinds of traits as a guide. Before looking more closely at these studies, however, it's worth first considering whether creativity is actually quantifiable.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran's musings on savants, who display exceptional skills in a very specific field, is illuminating in this respect, as he "unashamedly speculates" that a savant's talents may stem from an enlarged section of the brain called the angular gyrus. "You can imagine an explosion of talent resulting from this simple but 'anomalous' increase in brain volume," says Ramachandran, adding: "The same argument might hold for drawing, music, language, indeed any human trait." Ramachandran explains that this theory is at least in part testable, and points to examples where damage to the right parietal cortex "can profoundly disrupt artistic skills, just as damage to the left disrupts calculation." Ramachandran also considers possible the idea that these esoteric human traits can be attractive to mates in the way that a male peacock's plume is attractive, as exceptional ability in music, poetry or drawing may be an "externally visible signature of a giant brain." Citing Dawkins, Ramachandran argues "that this 'truth in advertising' may play an important role in mate selection."

Despite what seems to be logically valid reasoning, Ramachandran stresses that the talents and specializations associated with the savant are not enough. They will not become a Picasso or Einstein, because they are missing one vital, ineffable ingredient: creativity. "There are those who assert that creativity is simply the ability to randomly link seemingly unrelated ideas, but surely that is not enough," writes Ramachandran. We may have a fantastic grasp of language, and think that we can knock out a half decent metaphor on call, but it is actually harder than most people think. Yet when we come across something truly creative, it speaks volumes to us, "In fact," says Ramachandran, "it's crystal clear once it is explained and has that 'why didn't I think of that?' quality that characterizes the most beautiful and creative insights."

But if creative juices are responsible for an evolutionary advantage, there must surely be some aspect of this seemingly ineffable trait that can be identified as heritable. This brings us back to Geoffrey Miller, who argues that traits such as creativity are a result of personality disorders such as schizophrenia. Yes, that's right; Miller is arguing that what is usually considered to be an evolutionary disadvantage is actually just the opposite.

After conducting their own study, researchers Daniel Nettle and Helen Clegg believe that they have confirmed Miller's assertions, and in doing so have solved a long standing mystery. "There is an evolutionary puzzle surrounding the persistence of schizophrenia, since it is substantially heritable and associated with sharply reduced fitness," the authors begin in their paper entitled "Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans", published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society. The authors cite previous studies that claim schizophrenia is associated with poor health and reduced chances of reproduction, but add: "The fact that this does not appear to happen has lead many commentators to speculate that there must be other, beneficial effects of the traits."

Nettle and Clegg state that schizophrenia-proneness manifests in a number of different personality traits collectively known as schizotypy, with schizotypy coming in 4 distinct dimensions. Schizophrenia patients score more highly on all 4 dimensions, say the authors, with schizotypy scores being predictive of schizophrenia in longitudinal studies. The authors also point to studies of people within the creative arts who display increased levels of certain schizotypy traits, as well as a bulging case file of people with psychiatric illness in artistically successful families. Nettle and Clegg believe that there is enough evidence to support the idea that "artistic creativity is a candidate for the evolutionarily beneficial effect of schizotypy."

Studying a cross section of the community which was augmented by a targeted sampling of artists and poets, Nettle and Clegg set about examining the subjects' mating conquests, measured by such things as the length, type and number of encounters each subject had. The study included a mix of the 4 schizotypy dimensions:

• Unusual experiences
  Contains items referring to perceptual and cognitive aberrations and magical thinking.
• Cognitive disorganization
  Describes difficulties of attention and concentration.
• Impulsive non-conformity
  Refers to violent and reckless behaviors.
• Introvertive anhedonia
  Measures lack of enjoyment and social withdrawal.

It was found that not all schizotypy dimensions are advantageous in regard to creative attractiveness. Cognitive disorganization, for example, was not included in the path analysis, because they found it had no significant bearing on creativity or mating success, and introvertive anhedonia was found to have an inhibiting effect on both creativity and the number of mates.

Of the two remaining dimensions, unusual experiences was found to have a positive impact on creative activity, which in turn led to a positive effect on the number of partners, while impulsive non-conformity had a significant positive effect on the number of partners. Nettle and Clegg believe that these results are enough to support Miller's hypothesis that artistic creativity functions as a mating display. "The results are consistent with the view that schizotypal traits are maintained in the human population at significant levels because the negative effects in terms of psychosis and other psychopathology are offset by enhanced mating success."

These findings raise interesting questions. Where do we acquire our receptiveness to creativity and our appreciation for creative works? Is it innate, or are the people exhibiting creative schizotypy traits doing the hard work for us, by presenting reality to us in novel, imaginative and inventive ways? Whether or not we have a natural capacity for creative appreciation, our like or dislike of specific creative works may be primed by prior creative achievements.

One recent study illustrates this point. It examined what is known as "white space" in the advertising industry, and showed that what might appear to be an innate pull toward specific aesthetics in humans has actually been acquired from prior periods in art. In this particular case, the researchers found that our appreciation for white space - and the refined, chic qualities it conveys - harked back to the 1950s minimalist period. They also found that subjects unaware of the origins of white space still appreciated its intended qualities nonetheless. Given these findings, can we conclude that while humans have a capacity for creativity or creative appreciation, that this creativity is influenced by social norms predicated on past creative periods? A creative feedback loop, if you like, that constantly advertises one aspect of evolutionary fitness: creativity.
"

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Empirical web design tips

From
http://eyetrackingupdate.com/2010/02/03/tips-from-eye-tracking-studies-on-website-design/


"

Here at Eye Tracking update we’re often talking about lessons learned from the various eye tracking studies that have been done over the years. A reader recently forwarded a decent article that collected a bunch of these into one place. Twenty-three to be exact. Here are a few of them relating to webpage layout and design:

1. Text attracts attention before graphics. We as humans have become pretty good at filtering out all the extra “garbage” on a webpage, and contrary to what people might think, it’s not actually the images we’re drawn to on a page. Of course, this is a generalization. Many of us are more visual than others, but even as that’s the case, when we visit a site, we’re looking for information. Text is the most obvious form of information, and so that’s where our eyes often go at first glance.

2. By now it’s been well documented that eye movement tends to focus on the upper left corner of the page before anything else. If you have a website, you can help your readers by putting relevant information there, as opposed to placing it arbitrarily throughout the page.

3. Viewers love white space. White space is good. It’s tempting to fill up a page with text and images, but if you offer a viewer a white space, not only does it give them a place to rest their eyes, it helps focus information so readers know where to find it. Too much text overwhelms.

4. Web viewers tend to spend a lot of time looking at buttons and menus. So, make sure the site is easy to follow, buttons work (this seems like an obvious point, but you’d be surprised!), and that they are well designed well and organized.

5. The eyes are attracted to clean and clear faces. When using photos, it’s good to have images with people in them. Artsy and design-y photos may look great with the page, but when it comes to pure statistics, eyes fixate on simple, easy to read faces.

6. Be aware of fonts and text sizing because they influence behavior. Viewers tend to scan more across larger text, while smaller fonts increase focused viewing behavior. You may want a viewer to scan, or you may want focused attention, but it’s a decision that should be made purposefully and not randomly.

7. Paragraph length is important. Who wants to sift through an enormous paragraph like a needle in a haystack? The truth is, smaller paragraphs break up the gaze and move the eyes around the page in addition to helping to organize information and give it flow.

There are plenty more from the article, so take a look. The key lesson to take away from all these eye trackingand design studies, really, is that no decision should be arbitrary. There are reasons why certain placement and designs work, and reasons why they don’t. So don’t fall victim to arbitrary design. Look around online, buy a book, or delve further in with your own study: it will help both you and your viewers in the long run.
"

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Head Tracking On The Cheap

Link: http://eyetrackingupdate.com/2011/02/15/head-tracking-cheap/ (sent via http://shareaholic.com)

This confirms the possibility of a real NudeIt application.

"

A website was recently passed our way that gave pretty detailed instructions on how to build your own head tracker for cheap. We've seen a few of these in the past and others featuring eye trackers, but this one seems pretty well done so we thought we'd pass it along.

The post on maximumpc.com goes over the various parts and steps to create your own IR head tracker which, with recent buzz regarding Kinect (Microsoft) and the Playstation Move (Sony) – two motion controlled gaming systems on sale this year – seems more relevant than ever.

That said, the technology has been around for quite a while now. Head tracking allows control of a PC with the movements of your head, or in simulation gaming, head tracking allows control of an avatar, for example, as you duck and bob your head throughout the virtual environment.
Head tracking is commercially available but can be cost prohibitive; so one guy tells us how it's done with a simple web camera and a few bucks spent on electrical supplies.

The system is essentially made up of a couple parts – a web cam and a system of lights mounted on your head. The camera filters out most everything except the lights. The author recommends FreeTrack software to run the engine, interpreting the location of the lights to determine which direction the head is facing.

The majority of modern web cams work, but you'll need one with a high frame rate and low CPU usage as well as auto exposure that can be manually switched off. Resolution is not an issue – nothing more than 320 x 240 is needed, so if you can change the resolution, that's to your advantage. The post offers a number of cameras that could be used in conjunction with FreeTrack, but recommends Playstation's 3 Eye, which is a high quality, high frame rate camera available for not that much money. They've modified one for infrared light, which is easy to do as well, and the author provides illustrated guides to get the job done.

After going through steps on the point model and light source, you are well under way to getting a DIY head tracker on the cheap.
Take a look at the link for more details:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/how_build_your_own_ir_head_tracker

"

Causality and individual experience

I'm thinking about suicide and isolation.

Last year as I was reading research trying to understand the suicide rate in schizophrenia as part of my ongoing personal work. The suicide rate is why the drug clozapine can be justified for use. This is the most dangerous licensed narcotic. It kills. The antipsychotic is also the most effective at 'treating' schizophrenia.

I've been on antipsychotics for diagnoses of bipolar with paranoid features and schizoaffective: bipolar type. I've also smoked herbal cannabis for the same disorders, drugs which are as effective but unregulated. Users get to chose what they use and it doesn't need the dogma of psychiatry to get a prescription.

Skunk has been the best treatment for treatment resistant depression I've tried. I've tried sodium venlaflaxine. That's the best of what psychiatry has to offer for depression. The drug works with other neurotransmitters....the one that nicotine releases if I remember right. When I say tried I mean took it for 3 years along with massive doses of antipsychotics and mood stabilisers.

Had I gone psychiatry's way i'd have been dead inside and outside. Now I live an internal experience as well as an external one which would break a person's ego. I still hang out with old friends, friends who are successes in many ways. I'm sure I am too but in that coy way that isn't associated with success.

It's irrelevant of course. My journey was about change. I could have been one of those conventionally successful people who earn money but contribute minimally, or at least actively. For all my madness I could be a corporate tosser. For all my madness I am, but only to serve my ends.

My madness ripped me from a career path to success but it expanded my mind in a way i'd resort to drugs to do before. My madness brought about change, change to become someone old friends would be uncomfortable with but true friends still recognise.

An open mind is a quality far too rare in our world. Thanks to fucking psychiatry.

Anyway...causality and individual experience.

Well bear with another tangent. How we become, and how we become mentally ill. All psychiatry does in its highest scientific sense, the reliable judgement of reduced life outcourse (without psychatric treatment of course...) based on the existence of enough of a few symptoms (the operational cluster of symptoms approach) which is basically using science to attempt to tell a person's future (DSM, which is the American system) badly (Thomas szasz and the Myth of Mental Ilness and Richard Bentall Madness explained. Please google.) but better than any other system ever (Bentall in his award winning book madness explained though in a bad intepretation because he didn't quite convey the significance of the increase in reliability and validity through the better application of positivistic scientific methods).

And with all that the poor science forgets casuality too frequently. What is cause and effect is what I'm talking about.

The current science, the operational cluster of symptoms aligned with prognosis studies of the reduced life course of the mentally ill (as defined by the reference diagnostic criteria used in these studies rather than what happens in clinical practice), is flawed like chemistry is without a periodic table of elements.

There is limited understand in what is considered good evidence to support the cause. There is little reasoning which is supported by strong evidence which can withstand the onslaught of positivitic science which survives. Some might consider what I'm sort of rambling about as a quantitative evidence versus qualitative thing but it isn't because I understand why qualitative evidence is at the bottom of the tree. A systematic review disregards all bias and is evidence based. A good one at least. They are sadly ineffective and this is where qualitative research wins but this is not a reliable methodology. For example it seems to eschew both evidence and replication.

I might be wrong about those failings but it is regardless of what I'm saying. Both techniques can, to quote Chef in South Park, suck on my chocolate salty balls. Just put them in your mouth and suck them.

Before I suck on anyone else's balls of coca goodness I might stop to think. Causality and individual experience. I perhaps should have refined my language to lived experience but I'm a bit drunk and stoned.

If I can refer back to my chemistry example, one which refers to 'real' science then I can suggest that current techniques don't have anywhere near the predictability which comes from understanding cause an effect.

I know if I strike a match it will ignite. If it doesn't then I can try again but I need more force. Sounds like psychiatry?

No. Psychiatry understands what happens as a reaction of empirical things. Stuff as I might also describe it but perhaps here I'll be precise and write a rapid oxidation reaction which requires kinetic energy to overcome the potential energy barrier which creates the reaction from two solids striking rapidly enough to generate the friction required for the mixture of elements and compunds to ignite to produce an exothermic reaction which creates gases andincandeasent semi-gaseous solids (fire).

Sorry for the long sentence. I just had to explain what precision of definition is achieveable and what isn't in psychiatry.

Here, in this example, I've explained the future. Here's the present. We still need to understand cause and effect.

Who knows cause and effect? The psychiatrist can judge upon present symptoms as well as their own (non-scientific) judgement. The psychologists can guess and win awards for poor science. Sadly I'm a huge fan but only becausee I've come to ...another unsubstantiated theory?

Yeah. Kind of. If science can't perform then let the people, the mentally ill, decide. Many people upom hearing this statement might think I'm the master of lunacy (a reference to a title of a member of the UK court of protection until 2005 but I use to make a salient point about lunacy and sense).

Someone smarter than me must have said this. I think it might be Prof Richard Bentall in his book Madness explained. I'm not sure. Got halfway through and bored. He's meant to be going on about a complaints-based model and that's fair play and stuff but I haven't read it. If the person who relayed this information about the latter half of his book is correct then he's talking about an unevidence based distress continuum model having significantly challenged the psychopathology continuum which is generally percieved to be based on positivistic science.

I'm even less evidence based but have a better source of evidence. Bear with me please. I am bearing the burden of many organisations and concepts sucking on my chocolate salty balls.

The evidence is what is, in practice, the highest of the evidence hierachy. It is one which is off the published scale but so obvious. It is personal experience.

I've laboured at length in this long piece on the precision of science. But it barely exists in mental health. I'll use Bentall's technique to explain that no outside judger of your mental health based on the current state of science in the area is valid...

So am I talking shit? Perhaps...but I espouse a change in the dogma. The problem is I espouse a change in the established hierachy and, fundamentally, the hegemony of psychiatry. That sentence in proper communication means I value lived experience highly and consider those without worth of supping on my chocolate balls. At least when it comes to understanding me and my people, or the mentally ill as you would pathologise or perjoratise my very being.

You get me?

the antistigma movement is wrong

At least in one respect.

It isn't the stigma of the label which is what mental illness is: it's
the stigma of the symptoms.

The majority of the success of antistigima movements, at least large
ones, is all about language and labels. Many mainstream campaign
movements seem to have a bias towards the values of political
correctness and away from core concepts.

The stigma of mental illness is what causes the poorer outcomes in
life. The stigma is the stigma for symptoms alone. Psychiatry has just
added labels associated to clusters of symptoms to define the
behavioural modification required.

The stigma of the label is important but the root cause of mental
illness is, in my opinion, the illness in those who exclude, prejudge
and outcast the mentally ill. Not the mentally ill themselves.

Before psychiatry the outcomes fore the mentally ill were worse. They
were outcast from society and communities at the turn of the
Industrial Age. No psychiatric system existed. There was no label but
mad.

Mad pride and the Get Moving project are the real begins of true
antistigma. Their work is truly what makes real change. Being able to
be mad and not excluded is the aim of mental healthcare though perhaps
not psychiatry itself. The true heroes of this great battle, the
Martin Luther Kings and Gandhis, are those who understand the symptoms
are the root of the stigma and not the labels. They allow themselves
to be mentally ill to change the dysfunction in soicety.

The Great Confinement continues to perpetuate the myth that
psychiatric treatment is the way forward. All it has done is allowed
the pathologisation of ever greater swathes of the normal human race
while society's norms are allowed to constrict to make the smallest
forms of deviance judged with that terrible term, mad.

--
"Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being
wanted, for having someone to call their own."
Mother Teresa

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience
to remain silent."
Thomas Jefferson

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser
than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich

An interesting bit of personal insight into one person's suffering

http://ericacromptondotcom.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/psychosis/

It's a bit mean that I can be this clinical about someone's pain. I
think I've become somewhat jaded myself, what with my own shit. It's
actually been better the last few days but I still want to die and think
of death often. Living like this may change who I am and make me colder
and less emotional and sensitive to other people's emotions. I am feel
immovable like a rock but also unemotional like a rock.

Mental health treatment's paradigm

What is mental illness, severe mental illness, has may definitions to the single (nebulous?) word. For it to be an illness it must have a biological component to the deficit or disorder. Otherwise it's not an illness. There are other understandings of what mental illness is outside the biomedical model but these still assume the paradigm of the biomedical model which, in my view, is a dangerous misappropriation of the privilege of medicine.

Mental health treatments for severe mental illnesses such as bipolar or schizophrenia are usually based on medication primarily with other treatments such as talking therapies used far less often and society change seen very rarely.

The medication might be considered biological because the neurochemicals create behavioural changes and alleviate some symptoms. In the sense that these treatments are true medicines, ones which seek to treat the biological problem, is debateable. The chemical imbalance hypothesis is not a scientific fact. There is no scientifically established normal level of dopamine or serotonin. Certain behavioural changes can be achieved by using certain neurochemicals, but this doesn't mean their medicines or things which people who take the Hippocratic Oath should be prescribing.

There are studies which show differences and deficits. The MRI study commented on in this blog which looked at children with early onset schizophrenia showed a 5% overall reduction in a type of brain matter (grey or white, the less important kind) versus a 1% reduction compared to the carefully chosen control subjects during the length of the study. It is unclear whether this is due to the medication itself or an effect of the social exclusion. Children's brains are still developing through their experiences of life and if these are reduced by the impact of severe mental illness when the brain is in a more plastic state then this could influence organic brain development. There is a study showing taxi drivers have brain differences and these are achieved in adult brains with signficantly less plasticity to a child's brain. The taxi driver study is also commented on in an earlier blog post.

The medication does nothing to regenerate the brain and they may be neurotoxic themselves. The dopamine hypothesis isn't about the brain dysfunction as the mode with which the undesireable behaviours can be controlled.

The latter is the function of the majority of mental healthcare in my opinion especially for severe mental illnesses. The example is the extension of the use of the major tranquiliser, misnamed the antipsychotic, outside the treatment of supposed illnesses like schizophrenia. This drug type is also know as the chemcial cosh because it has the action of a straitjacket. It makes people docile and reduces unwanted behaviour. These drugs became used on the elderly in the community in the UK. The drug does not regenerate brain matter. It doesn't slow the progress of Alzheimers. All it does is treat the behavioural symptoms. It coshed the elderly into subdued states.

The treatment reduced life expectancy by 50% according to one highly influential observational study on the very elderly. This promoted the UK government to commission a report from the Royal College of psychiatry. They estimated the treatment killed 1,800 people a year in the UK unnecessarily.

First do no harm. This is the original first line of the oath which every doctor takes to be a doctor.

Because society's norms has changed so much they decided the behaviour of the elderly was abnormal enough to warrant change. I don't think they bothered doing any proper trials on how antipsychotics could stop or even reverse the neurodegenerative process involves in Alzhiemers. They didn't need to. This wasn't the objective. The objective was the same as had doctors recommended straitjackets and gags for the elderly, but those would have been safer. More obviously inhumane to the public consciousness too. Imagine the headlines: doctors are gagging and straitjacketing hundreds of thousands of the elderly.

This is the problem of the privilege of medicine applied to the problems of emotional and behavioural health. The privilege shouldn't because it's not always about illness and when it's not about a genuine illness then a different system or way of thinking needs to be applied.

What does it feel like to want to die?

The value of a research setting in healthcare outcomes

Can we really be listening to evidence, truly, unless something in our heads pops up with the statement I've titled this piece with.

I'm not going to take the obvious tack to consider research versus practice or clinical use. That's more comedy, in the sense of it's rubbishness but still assumed to be scientific, than I care to cry about right now.

What I'm talking about is shit like ECT. There was no good evidence to support the use of electricity to induce seizures as any good medical treatment. The modern psychiatric movement seem thankful of this but are biased because they believe ECT is amazing.

The evidence, based on a high quality meta-analysis, is ECT is as effective as a sham treatment where the patient thinks they're getting shocked while unconscious but no electricity is used and no seizure is induced, at least in pretty much all trials which compare followup rather than just the effect of a mental health treatment during the treatment period.

I don't understand the paradigm of medicine well enough to consider if a treatment is only effective during its use is it considered a treatment, and in this sense a cure, or not.

I think protangonists of ECT might suggest such evidence might mean ECT should be banned. I'd agree in one sense, but say that the effect needs to be understood.

ECT or sham-ECT is a last resort. Many ECT studies have exckuded a true control group because the refusal of treatment to those who really need it is immoral. It's why there are very few if any modern (in the last few, say 3, years) trials of antipsychotics versus a placebo for first episode psychosis.

Oh shit. I made it to the point I'm making in some drunk, stoned rant.

As the title suggest and the current discourse I've gone a fair bit off the point.

A segue to where I started from. Psychiatry fucks up with psychosis. World health organisation studies which show that small or non-existent psychiatric systems in poor nations offer better results than those in developed world nations.

This isn't a paradox. Not for anyone who's stayed outside the system.

Ugh. New thought process. How terribly insane of me.

I don't call it childhood misery. I call it childhood.

My childhood was far from great. Though academically excellent I was a mess. I'm just thinking about some particularly low moods of life and one of my earliest memories. I felt very miserable and very alone. This was when I lived in yorkshire so I was pretty young. I went to my parents door but hesitated before knocking. I don't want to falsify the reason why because my memory is less clear of why. I just returned to my room and my lonliness and misery.

Childhood wasn't all bad, especially the times I was able to excel and be valued for excelling. No wonder I'm a workaholic. My sister and close cousins never got that same adoration for excellence.

I acted out aplenty. It was only till I was 15 that I was thrown out of home for a few months. It really didn't feel so bad when it happened. That's how bad I felt.

There must have been some good times. Perhaps it's the retrospective lens I'm using which is seeing a lot of black. My mood isn't so bad today but that's in relative terms.

It was not my parents fault and consciously at least I bear no grudge though my unconscious actions may not. I barely speak to them or let them know about my life.

I as they are just a product of circumstances, the mixed of genotype with all the rest of the stuff to create people and their actions, and reactions.

I wonder just how much resilience I got from my parents who believed in the old epistomology of mental health. I work under a strain that may incapacitate many others. They may see the reasons but they're as wrong as I.

Just how long is it since I've opened my post?

This may be a spurious letter because I thought it was later than aug 2009, when this letter is date, when I stopped opening my post.

The letter's from Shelter thanking me for my small regular contribution. The letter has Shelters logo on the envelope.

I though it had been over a year but with this letter is close to a year and a half of unopened post I've got to go through.

This hell of debt is no fun for anyone. Debt probably has the same relationship to mental health as drugs. Some people can handle it. For others it wrecks their lives and makes a signifcant contribution to mental illness and distress. It makes many happier but there's a comedown and, for some, the come down can have signficant impact on their lives.

I was introduced to debt for the first time at university. The banks made it so easy to try it and lots of other people were doing it. I got hooked on it. Then I went manic and did loads of debt. Then I was suicidal and manic and depressed and all other shit and did a heck of a load of debt.

The results destroyed my life. I was almost homeless because of debt. I shattered inside. I was alone and poor, no longer the person I once used to be.

Kids. Just say no to debt.