An amusing name for a good idea

Sane Mind Rethink Foundation.....or Smurf.

Its an organisation that does exactly that: rethinks what sanity is and what mental health is, and what it should mean for mental healthcare practice.

It creates two memories that a person can associate. In theory in markets the other mental health charities and the major brands. That would be considered poor in marketing but would be clearly differentiated both in brand and in content of what it promotes.

Its not too clever a concept that it needs to be explained. It works without explanation too because the four terms make sense and make sense to the purpose of the charity. The acronym produces an amusing word. The whole concept should bring a smile to the individual hearing it for the first time and that should create a stronger memory and a positive association.

Just an idea.

Addictions

Current treatment for addictions is to achieve a state of abstinence as an outcome. This is a poor outcome. An addict can learn to manage their addiction. Many do. Probably many more than those who don't manage their addiction. I fall into the latter but I'm getting better at it.

The choice I made was to not let the drug control me but I chose a difficult path. Teetotallers can't enjoy what they used to enjoy with treatment for alcohol addictions. With new addictions like internet addictions becoming part of the diagnostic criteria there is a need for a different treatment outcome. Or will future mental healthcare attempt to make 'teetotalling' internet users?

Addicts are normal people and normal people enjoy themselves with all sorts of drugs, from alcohol to work. Yes, even work is an addiction that, for some people, follows the same patterns as a drug addiction. Teetotalling 'work' addicts would probably pick up a drug addiction or be prescribed a legal one to cope with the boredom.

A friend of a friend was diagnosed with an alcohol and sex addiction. He subsequently got a diagnosis of depression while successfully abstaining from both his old medications that salved his inner pain. The doctors prescribed him antidepressants.

The example is elucidating I hope on a point. Take from it whatever you will.

Treatment can also involve a 'cold turkey' and for some people it is enforced against their will. It is inhumane to force this on anyone. It is also exceptionally traumatic for some people even if they choose to go cold turkey. In the use of psychiatric pharmaceuticals its recommended that levels of medication be tapered off when coming off however I don't know if this happens with non-psychiatric psychopharmaceutical or other forms of self-administered treatment for unhappiness/filling the whole in your soul. I've seen people brought onto wards so they could get alcohol addiction treatment and that meant they felt severely unwell and went through painful withdrawal symptoms that were unnecessary pain.

The stigmatisation of drug use means that there is no representation for them, no voice amongst the professional campaigners fighting for other mental illnesses. This is why such an unnecessarily painful way to treat alcohol and drug addictions is allowed.

I can see why dual diagnosis is stigmatised of course: I do it to myself. This is why its seen as a self harming behaviour. Its also been explained to me as a form of obsessive compulsive by a therapist. The therapist was ethical at least. He worked in a drugs and alcohol counselling service and he tried to help me manage my minor addiction rather than push me down the 12-steps programme.

I doubt many people can even see dual diagnosis and addictions as a mental illness like any other. The stigma is different to the stigma of mental ill health because its redoubled by the public stigma against addicts and against drugs. I suspect that I wouldn't be popular if I espoused an alternative understanding based on personal experience rather than hearsay, biased media stories and what their parents told them.

Relationships

This is a photo inspired by another photo. I wish I could remember where
I saw it because I'd love to credit the photographer.

Its shot in Oxford Street one evening while out taking night photos.

Interpret it how you will. Explaining my own interpretation holds little
value.

A surprising result on love

I'd expected a search of articles in Google Scholar with "love" in the title to give a tiny number of studies compared to the number with "depression" in. In fact there are barely twice as many academic sources on depression as there are on love.

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=love&num=100&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=1.&as_sdtp=on&as_sdts=5&hl=en

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?sourceid=chrome&q=allintitle:%20depression&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws

However since 2000 there are just over three times as many on depression as on love.

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=allintitle:+love&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=2000&as_vis=0

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=allintitle:+depression&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=2000&as_vis=0

And drops back to around 2 times looking at sources from 2009.

There still significant. If I included "depressive", "melancholia" and other broad synonyms for intense unhappiness there may be a bigger effect.

The point I was going to make is that unhappiness is thoroughly medicalised however love doesn't seem to be. There'd be an interesting pub debate on whether is should be medicalised. In a way excessive love is - stalking may be considered a form of mental illness though I'm not sure under what diagnosis. I think there's a diagnosis in DSM-IV related to women who can't achieve orgasm. Liking sex too much is also in the American diagnostic criteria.

There certainly isn't a diagnosis for lack of love or avoidance of falling in love as far as I am aware. Living without that essential part of human life is something that many people live with, even people in relationships. The sadness of that makes me want to medicalise their sorrow, even if they don't recognise that they're missing out on a beautiful part of life.

The point I was hoping to make but I don't have the evidence to support it is that depression is medicalised because it affects people's work capability. A lack of love may cause depression but that is of little concern to medicine. It certainly offers no treatments. There are therapists who might advocate love as a treatment however they get struck off.

Would there ever be a society that could have "love leave" where a person needs to take time off because they've fallen in love and they want to enjoy that feeling and for it to blossom. I doubt I'd see that in my lifetime. It will be many decades before the shackles of Victorian conservatism and prudishness are overcome by progress towards the truer nature of humankind. The pub banter of "bet that person would chill out if they just had a shag" is where the wisdom remains.

I'm not sure if the barrier to a prescription of love (or sex in the jokey pub quote) becoming a regular treatment option is the prudish morality or the fact that the mental health care is becoming a system to keep people employed rather than anything to do with genuinely making life better for anyone. Certainly in the UK the people are seen as meat for the machine of society and improvements in mental healthcare are mainly in behavioural modification to get them back into whatever mindnumbing, soul crushing drivel that most people have to spend most of their adult lives doing.

Another post I have yet to write or perhaps I've written already is what I consider the next mental health system to be: unending, unconditional love for everyone by everyone. Its an insane idea but it comes from an understanding of why the second major mental health system (psychiatry) developed. Unconditional love for all means there would never have been the outcasts that were created as society changed during the Industrial Revolution/Age of reason. Homosexuality wouldn't have been treated as an illness. Psychosis would be an experience manageable in the community. Schizophrenia wouldn't exist.

I might as well as for heaven on earth....

What's love like for a mad person?

My head is heavy tonight. Its been one of those four seasons in one week weeks. Highs, lows, brutal crashes. My heart now feels torn asunder but the drink will salve that pain like it salves so many others. The medication of the hypocritical.

Last night someone asked me if I loved someone I shouldn't and I answered truthfully. It really hurt. The reason for the hurt is simply a realisation of what I already knew though, manifest through other people's paranoia.

What is love is something for another post. Its an interesting topic debated by many philosophers and fools. I know its feeling and I think many people never do. I allow it to happen because it is a wonderful and painful feeling that makes life worth living and losing. Its part of life and misconstructed social norms mean the most beautiful of emotions is fettered by outmoded ideas of morality.

Love has a purpose. To bring two people together. To lay the foundations for a relationship. To unite two souls that once drifted endlessly alone through the ether.

It has no purpose to me other than the feeling itself. What point is there when when I fall in love I value that person and as soon as I do I know there's no point. When I fall in love I know that nothing can come of it because I know I'm not good for them. Only in moments of irrationality or mania do I make the mistake of having a relationship.

Some idiot counsellor would try and tell me that that's not true but I know better. I know I'm not a good person. I know that when I'm a mess I can be a real mess. I go through times where I lose the plot entirely, where my madness overtakes and there's nothing anyone can do. I have nothing to offer anyone in terms of the constructs of long term relationships. I fit few of the 'essential criteria' that people use to judge a person worth of a relationship. Self harm scars seem to only be attractive to a very small minority of people. And while I'm not suicidal now nor have been actively so in some time I live with the knowledge that I will take my own life.

My life is a total mess but its my life. I'd never inflict it on a person I love. I ask for no sympathy because I do ok without that hope. I survive and I thrive without that thing that others have and consider an essential part of existence, and I survive with a smile on my face.

But being accused by someone who barely knows me about something that is a silent burden for me is heartbreaking. Thank fuck for my true lover, my companion, my only friend in this sick twisted thing called life. Oh alcohol, I love you.

Depression could be useful

Here's a theory that fits the idea that mental illness can have a point, a purpose and a positive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?em=&pagewanted=all

Here's a summary from a blog post I found the article from.

http://smarterware.org/5371/the-evolutionary-reason-for-depression

Here's a great quote as well.

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness." ~William Saroyanb

What value is there in an IQ test?

People value a construct of intelligence in modern society and one of the measures is IQ. Its probably not a correct measure but its a well studied one and well regarded. It differs somewhat from social or informal measures of intelligence which can revolve around a person's ability to recall information they've read before.

To me that's not real intelligence but I'm not sure what is. The relevance is also little. This is because IQ can change and people can learn. A person may score low at a certain point in their life on a specific measure, for example Einstein failing the Maths component of his early education, yet go on to score highly in later life, for example the huge amount of complex mathematics he worked through to derive E=MC2 (though he may have stilled scored poorly on a measure designed for students).

There may be a genuine measure of intelligence but its irrelevant. Most people today have an exceptionally high probability of achieving a genius level of intelligence given suitable opportunity and support as well as perseverance, or perspiration as Edison put it (genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration).

There's a film from the early 1980's called Trading Places where a down and out homeless guy swaps jobs with a high flying corporate banker and vice versa. The evil boss bankers run this experiment to see if what I'm talking about is true. In the film it is. The black homeless guy is a better success than the white, well educated, socially conforming banker in the story. The banker ends up living with a hooker and lives the life of the down and out just as well as the black guy.

With mental health there are observed cognitive deficits for various diagnoses and these disadvantage many people going through the experience who don't discover ways to cope or get round it, for example schizophrenics who don't write stuff down to solve the working memory deficit problem. This disadvantage is rarely observed in the disability model.

To me this means that intelligence itself is not important or not as important as the capability to achieve intelligence. The latter is a function of the advancement of society rather than a quality that has value measuring in the individual.

There is also an element where people do have different intelligences (rather than higher or lower) so were Mozart to be stuck working as a computer programmer he'd fail miserably and were Bill Gates to be a farmer he might be a poor one.

Ultimately its the willingness of society to improve and utilise intelligence that's seriously lacking and while its great to know that people have an IQ its more important to use it. Opportunity for all is more important that measuring an individual's excellence or deficit.