Global Mentalist News Round Up

In this round up – Post Natal illnesses; DSM-V; suicide by BBQ; a look at some mental health “science” and a new name for us all to gossip about – the (possibly very soon to be ex) NHS Manager Caroline Davis.

But first; Ladies and Gentleman – I give you the ubiquitous Mr R D Laing who is apparently, and always was, to some members of his family – a crock of shit.

It seems they’re going to do “R D Laing: The movie“. Indeed, Robert Carlyle is excited about the opportunity to play Laing himself. Laing was renowned for his radically different approach to mental health treatment as a free-spirited somewhat existential and compassionate human being – who happened to drop a lot of acid. He was probably the earliest form of the ‘celebrity guru’ too. But a comment from the family suggests his charismatic humanitarian persona-celebre wasn’t so prominent at home -

Adrian, a successful London lawyer said: “When people ask me what it was like to be R D Laing’s son. I tell them it was a crock of shit.”

So anyhow – let’s get the gossip out of the way all in one go -

Just who is Caroline Davis and what has she done?

Caroline Davis, assistant director of strategic partnerships at Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust, made the comment on her Friends Reunited page, on which she listed the places she had worked.

She wrote: “I now live in Dover, where I work for ther NHS, bull*****ing for a living, no change there then.”

Oops.

Social networks seem to be becoming more and more a bain rather than a pleasure or delight. Ask Dr Scot Junior from last year (check medical blogs if you really care) who get suspended for calling some academic a “shit”. There’s been a few comments, even from the NMC, about professionals being more careful when making comments on t’internet. I do agree with that. Your private pc in your home is not your private life when you publish on the global webosphere.

Incidentally, I’ve also heard tales of debt collectors and the like making good use of social network groups and recently watched a TV documentary where a summons was served via Facebook and upheld by the judge.

Talking of judges – here’s one in San Jose who’s been having a personal play with “mental health meets criminal law” for some time. I like the sound of it and it reminds me of a post I did a while back on giving mentally disordered offenders a time-limited treatment sentence – only to find out they’ve been doing it for over a decade in some states of America. What is most strikingly different about Judge Manley’s appoach is – he’s lost the stuffy dogmatic courtroom pomp and replaced it with a caring sharing grandpa type approach -

On a typical day in Manley’s courtroom, the atmosphere is different from any other corner of the justice system. Ordinary courtroom formalities are nowhere to be found. Defendants chat directly with the judge, who pores over their files with a frequent pause to tell them, “You are doing great!” Each case eventually shifts to a therapy session.

“Alex,” appearing on the judge’s mental health calendar, is getting praise for his treatment program, assuring Manley he’s taking his medication. When he tells the judge he’s playing piano, Manley nearly erupts: “I didn’t know you play the piano!”

As the judge is ready to move to the next case, he points to the ever-present bowl of candy on the defense table. “Have some candy,” he tells Alex. And then the crucial moment for every defendant — everyone in the courtroom, from defendants in county jail garb to sheriffs deputies, applauds, the punctuation mark on any case headed toward success.

Which leads me to write about how important it is to consider the way we treat others – and more so when mental health issue are at play.

Vivienne Parry of the Times presents 5-a-day evidence-based advice for good mental health straight out of Foresight from the New Economics Foundation.

• Connect with the people around you
• Be active
• Take notice
• Keep learning
• Give

Some people think this is proscribing behaviour – but isn’t that what ‘advice’ is?  A previous Times article on the issue carries this comment:

“The implication is that if you don’t do these banal things, you could get seriously mentally ill, and that trivialises serious mental illness. What is happiness, anyway? It’s so subjective,”

Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas

WTF is an Institute of Ideas? The government equivalent of Hallmark cards? Who sought her opinion and why?

It sounds like another pointless institute akin to the Ministry of Funny Walks.

My God I can see them all now sat around a big mahongany table in directors chairs – sucking on lead pencils – … until Roger the slightly red-headed bearded ex-sociology lecturer in tweed announces…..

“Wait – I’ve got an idea!”

… “Hmmm , no, .. hang on….. nah… hmm.. sorry.. it’s gone again.”

Don’t they realise that too much thinking can cause obesity?

The research team, supervised by Dr Angelo Tremblay, measured the spontaneous food intake of 14 students after each of three tasks. The first was relaxing in a sitting position, the second reading and summarizing a text, and finally completing a series of memory, attention, and vigilance tests on the computer. After 45 minutes at each activity, participants were invited to eat as much as they wanted from a buffet.

The researchers had already discovered that each session of intellectual work requires only three calories more than the rest period. However, despite the low energy cost of mental work, the students spontaneously consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests.

On the other hand – Inês Barros at the Wellcome Trust’s Sanger Centre in Cambridge suggests we’re genetically predisposed to it…

“It might seem remarkable that it is the brain that is most commonly influenced by genetic variation in obesity, rather than fat tissue or digestive processes, but today almost all those we have uncovered are likely to influence brain function,”

So it’s got nothing to do with putting more food in my mouth than comes out of my arse? Excellent. Pass the trifle…

Talking of pointless institutes…..

The clandestine DSM think tank team is getting a bit of a slating recently – here’s a couple of thoughts from others:

Psychiatrists working on the update to the manual must sign a confidentiality agreement, the Los Angeles Times reported. Critics say, however, the American Psychiatric Association should allow outside observers to review the scientific debate behind new, revised diagnoses.

Among those speaking against the process the manual’s third edition editor, Dr. Robert Spitzer, considered the most influential psychiatrist of his generation, the Times said.

[source]

The original LA Times article [google a link here if you really want to read it] carries this question:

Why the fuss? Authors of the forthcoming fifth edition are pledged to secrecy, leading others to question whether science should be done behind closed doors.

Blogger Giannakali had this to say:

How in hell can the DSM be considered science?? There is not a single scientific test out there to measure anything that is called a “diagnosis” in the DSM. That’s part of the problem right there. People think that because people with MDs make these labels up they are by default scientific.

In the post-partum mental health disorders – there are two distinctly different ones – even the DSM gets this right – post-natal depression and peurperal psychosis. Both get a mention in different UK papers:

Sarah May writes about her experience of PND:

So what had gone wrong? Sitting in front of my wardrobe that day, I concluded that my post-birth high came to an end around the same time as my partner’s paternity leave. The sound of the front door slamming shut in the morning – when my older son left for school, and then again when my partner left for work – gained a whole new resonance that I came to associate with profound loneliness.

Louise Nazeraj presents her experience of peurperal psychosis:

I had been preparing myself for the “baby blues” on the fourth or fifth day but I seemed to be on a euphoric high. I remember trying to describe it to my mother and I could sense she felt it wasn’t quite right – my emotions were too extreme. By day seven, I still hadn’t slept. Strange shapes were slipping around at the edge of my vision and I became convinced that voices were whispering about what I was doing.

Seven days without sleep is not good. Dr Freeman tells us why:

A total of 300 common people without histories of mental illness were asked to complete questionnaires that highlight symptoms of insomnia and paranoia. Similar questionnaires were completed by 30 psychiatric patients, who were all diagnosed with psychotic conditions marked by paranoid delusions.

The scientists wrote in the journal Schizophrenia Research: “The results were clear: higher levels of insomnia were associated with higher levels of persecutory thinking.”

Dr Freeman said the research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, suggested that tackling an inability to sleep could reduce the risk of paranoia.

What I do like about this is how psychiatric patients are apparently no longer a part of the “common people”.

So sleep deprivation can lead to paranoia – or does paranoia lead to insomnia – or do they both self-perpetuate? These are the questions that keep me awake at night…. that and trying to catch the SAS infiltration squad spying on me.

One undoubtedly radical “cure” for insomnia – is suicide – where you can sleep for a very very long time.

A new popular way in in some Asian countries, particularly in Hong Kong and Taiwan is apparently…

Burning barbecue charcoal in an enclosed space to create carbon monoxide intoxication

This article led me to discover a rather interesting blog devoted to discussing “Rational Suicide” called The View From Hell. It isn’t Ted I don’t think; but the author does challenge the doctrine of society’s predisposition to employ coercive anti-suicide measures and suggests much of it is simply a waste of time:

And even if coercive suicide prevention does prevent some suicides, they will be the wrong suicides. Take away the right to charcoal burning (not to mention the right to barbiturates), and you force people to choose between committing suicide by violent or ineffective means, or remaining alive in misery. And that is wrong.

Talking of siblings.. (?) … apparently if your sibling has a mental health issue or an intellectual impairment – you’ve got a raised chance of getting one yourself.

It was found those who had a sibling who has had ever suffered from depression, an anxiety disorder or other mental illness were 63 percent more likely to have ever been diagnosed with depression

So for those site visitors who might entitle themselves “service users” who have younger siblings; remember from your CBT classes on how to ‘reframe’ something – let’s think of it as ‘sharing’ and it’s good, especially at this time of year, for kids to share.

After all, Christmas is a time of fairy tales and fantasies and believing in the make believe. Ahh… the harmless innocence of childhood…. or is it?

[ cue sound: Dun dun duuuuuhrrrr....! ]

Gaynor Sbuttoni, Child Psychologist, offers some advice on what to consider when answering a child’s question on:

“Mummy Father Christmas can’t be real can he?”

“What you don’t want is a child to turn round and say, ‘You lied to me and I trusted you’,” says Sbuttoni.

Of course not. Because kids don’t really care about the presents – they care about the little fat man in the red suit (TM Coca Cola) who consumes the mince pie and sherry.

But we do want our children to have absolute belief in their world about them and not grow up feeling it was all a sham.

So on that note, I hope you all had a good time celebrating the miraculous virgin Mary’s birth of a baby Jesus who was the son of God who lives somewhere in a place called Heaven that is not on google maps*.

*Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas is said to have suggested we should also abolish Christmas as it wasn’t her idea.

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