Depression

This dog reminds me of Churchill and he had a metaphor for depression:
the black dog.

I know little but snippets from his life. He was a drunk. He was a
fighter. He was hard and immoral when the time came, though in his
immorality (as with all) he did it because he thought it was right. I'm
specifically talking about the strategic bombing of Germany civilians.
He was a bad man but he was right for the time and its highly likely
that Britain wouldn't have been victorious without his dogged
determination, the dogged determination that comes from a life of
misery. His speeches were vital to the country's moral and while he may
not have written all of them his black energy rumbled through the
country with the strength that comes from suriving day after day of his
black dog.

He said one of my favourite off the cuff comments and is an eminently
quotable man.
"Madam. I may be drunk but you are ugly. At least I shall be sober in
the morning."

Human value

This poor soul is an advertisement. He still maintains his air of
dignity in the face of the profound shame of being a sign. He's probably
a student or an educated man come to the UK looking for streets paved
with gold.

Is it right that a conscious being, someone with awareness, will and a
soul is reduced to this. The man was ashamed of what he did but this was
all he could do to earn a living. He would probably have lived in
extreme poverty to have to debase himself such to earn enough to eat
doing this mindnumbing, spirit crushing work.

What humanity is there in this image? Only the soul of the human
standing resolute in the face of the stinking reality of the maladapted
society we live in.

As a participant in this image I feel a strange guilt. I took photos of
this man and his humilation. I am part of the same society that sees not
the beauty shared amongst us and the opportunity for work that makes the
best and the best use of all of us but instead blindly allows the
creation of jobs that demean. The modern evolution of the slavery.

This man is not meat. This man is not wood. He is alive.

What is mental illness?

I'm hungry.

I know I need to eat.

I can't eat.

Medication and psychological therapies

Psychiatric medication induces physical illness and there is a risk to life. This is true of many of the chemicals used in mental health. The worst are the antipsychotics but even antidepressants have been shown to caused Sudden Cardiac Death syndrome and suicide in some people.

Its doesn't take advanced knowledge of neurobiology to realise that none of the treatments are truly selective in the neurotransmitters and brain functions they target. That's why there are side effects unrelated to serotonin transmission or the treatment of unhappiness. This action outside the target sites affects other autoneurological mechanisms, some of which may regulate body function. Affecting this will change the way other systems in the body work and this could be a cause of reduced life expectancy. The dramatic effect of antipsychotic drugs is well established in the studies on dementia patients where life expectancy was reduced by half in very old people.

Medication is not a solution to mental ill health either. The drugs can remove symptoms but its just as easy to say, you're unhappy - go get high. Antidepressants are narcotics though they don't act as quickly as the illegal narcotics. Antipsychotics are a chemical cosh or straight jacket in pill form. Mood stabilisers remove a person's full range of emotion.

The solution of medication means that people never learn to cope with a life crisis and there's no need for healthcare to make an attempt to explore the deeper nature of the individual and understand the reasons behind their pain and suffering. Its probably because that wisdom has become in short supply over the last century as the convenience and effectiveness of drugs meant consensus thought focused on those treatments.

The safer alternative is psychological therapies but few people understand what that actually means, including myself. I think psychological therapies are like going to see a sage or a life teacher. Its not about offering an answer or a solution but helping the individual find the solution themselves. That paradigm doesn't easily fit simplistic outcome measures but that's a sign of the lack of wisdom that's so pervasive in modern society.

The solution to life's distress, unexplainable phenomenon, intense emotional crisis, life events impacting on mental health and ability to cope are treated in modern times by drugs because there are few true teachers of life left. The Royal College of Psychiatry's motto is "Let wisdom guide" but there's little wisdom in supporting state-funded opiates of the masses instead of helping people find the wisdom themselves to live life. It is a sign of psychiatists ineptitude however the wisdom has remained in the true psychologists remaining, the true sages.

Marathon

I really like this image even though its not very technically good. It
was shot at the 2009 London marathon.

I like high contrast black and white. When I started learning
photography I used Ilford HP5 developed in Ilford Ilfotec HC (their
press-orientated black and white developer) and often pushed the film so
grew familiar with that sort of print style.

This shot is slightly out of focus, the contrast is too high and the shadows need work but the
poor technique is made up for by a great moment and I like the composition.

Shot with a Canon 40D and Sigma 70-200mm at f2.8

A little on the biopsychosocial model

Unhappiness has many causes. The biopsychosocial model explains them in their entirety.

It seems pretty easy to do on the biological side of things. Eat little, move little, stay indoors and drink a lot. Its a sure fire way to prepare for another trigger. The psychosocial ones are used the most powerful but it varies from person to person. Its lucky that life's hard and cruel. There's lots of triggers to choose from.

The variance of the significance of the factors of the biopsychosocial model amongst individuals is high and I think changes with individuals over time. Biological factors may not cause depression in me like they would in other people but thats because I've become resilient to them through many years of living with poor eating habits, addictions and never going to the gym. I don't think that's the same for everyone though. I think I've been like that for a long time. When I took psychiatric medication I needed very high levels - the pharmacists would ask if I was sure these were for me because the doses were enough for two people.

The biopsychosocial model is the start of a truly scientific understanding of the mind though it may in truth be the spiritual-biopsychosocial model. Both of these are concepts far in advance of the current consensus work of psychiatry which focuses on diagnosis and treatment based on operational definitions. It ends up with a system that understands all the materials in the world as they are and not as combinations of indivisibile elements. The mental health periodic table o elements is so far in the future its hardly worth conceiving however it will be the leap the Humane Genome Project or the Mendeleev and Meyer periodic tables were in other sciences.

Medicalising lack of risk taking

Its understandable that a person would not want another human being to feel misery. There's is so much of it around. Many people don't like being miserable and would want care and concern. In fact many people may be miserable because they have a lack of care and concern from other people.

Mental healthcare exists because people are miserable and don't want to be, and for some its decided that their willingness to handle misery is a symptom of illness in itself. It could be argued that depression is not an illness and perhaps in later life that's true but in youth a person with the wisdom of a senior may not live well their younger years.

The folly of youth is an important aspect of early development without which an individual may end up characterless and featureless. I've met many a dull individual who have the mental illness of never having taken a risk in their entire life. It means that person has never really lived, never really experienced the complete range of life's experiences which come from the trials and the tribulations.

And yet what I've done here is medicalised something that is different from me. I've medicalised a way of thinking or feeling that I think is odd and should be changed to how I think or feel. What is not normal to me can so easily be rationalised as a mental illness. Taking the above example further I could conduct research possibly using the established measures for impulsiveness reversed and show a poor prognosis.

We live in an age where anything can be justified using and abusing evidence.