Ugh and insight

It seems like I have a real alcohol problem or the alcohol is medicating
what's an otherwise hard to manage state.

I haven't slept. I didn't drink last night. I'm mildly concerned because
not sleeping is a big warning sign for me. It's just one day. I've also
got an important conference call to deal with. I don't get paid for my
work in mental health and if I fuck this call up it's not going to be a
good thing. I may have to make an important decision.

It's been about 4 or 5 years now since I came off a regime of medication
that peaked at 3g of sodium valporate, 0.7g quetapine fulminate and
225mg sodium venlaflaxine, some thyroxine and propananol. Just as it was
stupid to come off all of those straight away it's clearly stupid for me
to stop drinking straight away.

I've gotten by with a little help from my friends. The ones that are
left after crisis.

There were times when it was very hard being off medication. Somehow I
managed not to kill myself. I went through psychosis without the
assistance of medical professionals.

I went to work while I went through paranoid delusions. These were not
the normal mild delusions and paranoias that people experience every
day. These are the normal but far from mild delusions and paranoias that
people have experienced since the dawn of consciousness.

I told no one but it have been obvious at times, for example when I came
into work with a cut on my forehead from a self-harm incident the
evening before. I did what I could to get through my part time job while
my life was shattered and my mind was being destroyed. This is "ego
death" in the precise meaning and the lay meaning btw.

My job involved reading a lot of mental health information. There was
also a good community. It was a unique therapeutic experience and a life
changing one.

It was as life changing as my first hospitalisation. At the time I'd
started on what should have been a promising career but through drink,
drugs and mental illness I fucked it up pretty quickly.

I understand why mental illness is an illness. The difference in
outcomes can be massive. My two oldest friends. On their 30th birthdays
both owned their own flats, one was a GP and the other worked in America
earning over $100,000. One of them had a major life crisis and did lots
of drugs but never received a diagnosis of mental illness.

I remember my 30th birthday. I had been planning to kill myself by then.
I came fairly close too. I was on incapacity benefit and living in
temporary accommodation. I'd managed to alienate most of my friends
through my behaviour when I was mad. Having been on such a high level of
medication for a 3 years meant it took me a while to readjust and it
wasn't a pleasant process. In fact it was hell. We went to the
Wetherspoons in Baker Street for the celebration. A few people turned up
but I think many of them would have secretly preferred I was dead at the
time.

That's why it's an illness. When I'm 'well' people like me. When I'm
'unwell' people dislike me and that affects my life. When I'm reckless I
do things that mess things up for years like take loans I don't need.
There are times I can't perform as well as my 'normal' counterparts. My
behaviour can be so bad I can instill feelings of hate and revulsion in
friends who've known me most of my life.

I can get anxious from one night without sleep because it's a big
warning sign. For many people it would be irrelevant. For someone who's
had to live through all this shit it can be worrying. The one thing I
depend on is clinging to that elusive thing that's called "insight".

An insight into how diagnosis is formed

A quote taken from the Wikipedia Schizoaffective page about the diagnosis's change in DSM-V.

"Citing poor interrater reliability, some psychiatrists have totally contested the concept of schizoaffective disorder as a separate entity.^[9][10] The categorical distinction between mood disorders and schizophrenia, known as the Kraepelinian dichotomy, has also been challenged by data from genetic epidemiology.^[11] Consequently, some researchers have disputed that the term "schizoaffective disorder" refers to a well defined condition, and have recommended that the term be removed from or amended in future diagnostic manuals.^[12] In April 2009, the DSM-V Psychotic Disorders Work Group headed by psychiatrist William T. Carpenter of the University of Maryland, College Park School of Medicine, reported that they will be "developing new criteria for schizoaffective disorder to improve reliability and face validity," and that they will be "determining whether the dimensional assessment of mood will justify a recommendation to drop schizoaffective disorder as a diagnostic category."^[7] Speaking at the May 2009 annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association, Carpenter said, "We had hoped to get rid of schizoaffective [disorder] as a diagnostic category because we don't think it's valid and we don't think it's reliable. On the other hand, we think it's absolutely indispensable to clinical practice."

Falling

6 month follow up of employees

I read this as an idea for organisations somewhere. Its a pretty good idea.

To check on employees six months after they've left to see how they're
doing.

Given the well established effects of redundancy on mental health it
could be a useful safety check.

It would be a way that mental healthcare could be part of society rather
than just something done by the NHS healthcare system.

Thoughts on the spec of a photographer's computer

Digital photography and photographers have special requirements.

The best off the shelf PC for photographers is the Apple Mac however a
custom designed PC can be significantly better.

Image quality is paramount and that's hard to ascertain from
specifications. As far as I am aware there is no way other than by
directly comparing cards and monitors or buying expensive specialist
equipment from brands like Eizo. The best quality card I've used is an
old Matrox AGP card. This may not be a problem with DVI. Other than that
there's little value in a high performance graphics card for
photography. High performance cards are optimised for games and 3D
design. I don't think any of the major photo software can access the
floating point operation calculation potential of modern graphics cards
but this may have changed with products like Adobe Creative Suite 5.
Even an integrated chipset is suitable

Monitors are still important and a correctly calibrated monitor is
essential. The best price-performance a couple of years ago was from a
PVA panel however IPS technology panels have dropped in price. OLED
screens at the size required for photographers are a way off. CRTs are
still the best quality however TFTs are catching up. A 22" CRT takes up
a lot of desk area too. 24" is really the minimum size for a photography
workstation however dual monitor setups are an alternative. Price
conscious shoppers should look for the best panel at the cheapest price
then get it calibrated correctly.

RAM is important for intuitive interaction with the software. Images
take up a lot of RAM. A 20Mb RAW file may take 140Mb of memory to store
in RAM (I can't remember why). Sometimes many layers are used. Modern
photography programs also take up a lot of RAM. Adobe Lightroom uses
about half a GB though GIMP is lightweight. 2GB ia enough for most users
but people using multiple layers will want at least 4GB and a 64-bit
operating system (to use the full 4GB). Speed is also important because
the RAM is an important part of the computational requirements for
processing images and any bottleneck with be the slowest point in the
system. Faster RAM is relatively cheap and DDR3 provides exceptionally
fast data rates for not a lot more money. The decision on whether to
overclock the system will also affect the choice of RAM but that
requires a lot more thought.

Modern processors are very quick and Intel chips have gotten much better
at floating point operations. This was one of the reasons that Apple
Macs used to be prefered by artists and designers - the IBM chips were
signifcantly faster than the Intels. In fact AMD made their mark on the
PC industry by outperforming the Intels on FP calculations which were
used in games, graphics, video and photography programs. Intel have
caught up though and the Core is a pretty amazing processor.

The value of multiple cores has always been an advantage for
photography. Photoshop has been optimised to run in a myltithreaded
environment though I'm not sure if its been recoded to take advantage of
thew new quad core chips. The latest ones can automatically overclock a
single core so single-threaded software like GIMP can still get maximum
advantage from the power of the chip.

Basic photo processes - crop, curves, contrast etc - don't have high
requirements for processors. Unsharp mask is the most demanding of the
commonly applied photographic effects. A near bottom of the range quad
core processor slightly overclocked is enough for intuitive interaction
when working with files from a 15 megapixel digital semi professional
SLR. There are more complex filters such as Selective Guassian Blur
which require a lot of processing power and this is when a high
performance, overclocked PC becomes necessary and cost-effective. One an
original low-range Intel Pentium D Selective Guassian Blur could take
10-20 mins to work on a 8 megapixel file from a consumer DSLR.

Hard drives are also vital. It is common to save a photo then move onto
the next one which creates a high demand on disks. Unfortuneatly high
performance drives haven't come down in price much. I think a RAID 5
array is pretty much essential for a photographer's workstation because
it offers redundant storage and high performance. 4 500GB drives cost
less than £150 and offer 1.5TB of redundant storage. A RAID 0 + 1 array
offers higher performance if cost is no object. These are all now
available on high end motherboards with suitable chipsets such as the
Intel ICH9R (the R deniotes the inclusion of the Intel Matrix Storage
controller chip). External RAID drives are also available however are
considerably more expensive and may not offer the performance. Windows
can do RAID in software though only in basic striping or mirroring and
there's a decrease in performance because the of the processor overhead.
Online backup is also essential for the photographer's portfolio. This
provides disaster proof, corporate level data redundancy.

The main consideration with the motherboard, apart from the inclusion of
a suitable RAID controller, is the potential to overclock This requires
premium motherboards. An alternative would be a faster chip with a cheap
motherboard however processors get much more expensive very quickly. A
low end processor with some clever overclocking can be as fast or faster
than a mid or high end processor. I like Asus motherboards because
they've reliably been the best for over 15 years but other manufacturers
are worth considering..

.Input devices are also important however my knowledge of graphics
tablets is very low.

I think a good looking case is important. Computers should be beautiful.
A machined aluminum case from Coolermaster or Antec can look great and
offer better cooling and quieter running.

Some people may want a very quiet PC. It is possible to build a fanless
design without resorting to extreme solutions such as filling the PC
internals with oil (which has been tried and works very effectively).
Levianthan passive heatsinks or exotic case-come-heatsinks can offer
silent high performance computing though these are pretty expensive. For
those who want true silence solid state disks are the key and these are
dropping in price. A 160GB SSD is around £400 and if these follow
Moore's Law these will be affordable in a few years.

I was wrong

Bleuler uses the term group of schizophrenias.

Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien is the title of the
book or the paper.

However I'm right about it's meaning. It's not useful to use the
etymological root of what is a neologism. It means a splitting of the
mental faculties as Bleuler saw schizophrenia and was different to
Kraeplin's dementia praecox model. The modern understandings of
schizophrenia have evolved significantly since both of those words.

Sticking needles into mice can relieve pain

This blogger is ace.

He's explaining the science behind the newspaper headlines.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/06/when_what_an_acupuncture_study_shows_is.php

The science is way above my head tonight. It seems the study is a high
quality study that shows sticking needles into mice and twisting them
causes brain stuff to happen.