Wells for Zoe

I'd like to refer readers of Psychiatry and Society to the following page: http://wellsforzoe.wordpress.com/. It is well worth a look. I mentioned John and Mary Coyne in my previous post; this is their blog. John and Mary are both former teachers, and John a developer, and they and their organisation Wells for Zoe have attached themselves to SJOG in Mzuzu, Malawi, in the past couple of years. (Mary teaches here.) Wells for Zoe began as a pump-providing operation - providing clean water to villages in the Mzuzu area, so women or girls don't have to walk ten kilometres with ten litres of water in a bucket on their heads. They still sink pumps but it has recently expanded into microcredit and other things - the recent blog entries describe a project, which the Coynes recently took me and Sharon along to, to drain and reclaim unused bog-like land, previously unsuitable for cultivation, and cultivate it using organic methods. (Fertiliser is expensive, and environmentally dodgy, and unnecessary). There's a recent John Waters IT piece on the blog too.
I mention this partly because it's just worth mentioning... and partly because it illustrates quite nicely how psychiatry and society sometimes mix in ways that you would not expect. Had SJOG, a mental health service, not been in Mzuzu, the Coynes would not have come here (they would have gone somewhere, not here) and the women you see in this picture, http://wellsforzoe.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/malawi-1-may-2007-059.jpg, shaking hands with Sharon, Mary and me (I felt like the Queen) would not now be growing carrots and tomatoes and peas and Chinese cabbage for sale in the market to make money for soap and oil and school fees. And the village chief, beaming in the background, would not have handed over a huge plot of his own land (not without a fight!) to a group of local women: essentially we're talking a feminist agri-co-op. The chief is the only local man in the picture; there were four guys there that day and a dozen women. Physical labour and indeed providing for the family remains predominantly women's work. The chief is the guy in, if you squint, the Beckham shirt. Beckham in Malawi is another post entirely.

Computer games and mental health

Hi all,

I remember my first job in psychiatry was with a general adult, community based team in ... well, perhaps I better not say. Most of the multidisciplinary team were ladies of, well, a certain age. There I was, new to psychiatry and with the paralysing shyness that comes with lack of clinical experience, somewhat dazzled in the team meetings. Anyway, the point of this nostalgic rambling beginning is that I recall that the team members had a pretty dim view of computer gaming. They might refer to a client/service user/patient's son as being a pretty likely future client/service user/patient themselves, based largely on their long hours of playing Championship Manager or whatever (I think I'm showing my age here)

It has been argued - most entertainingly by a chap called Steven Johnson in a book with the great title of "Everything Bad Is Good For You" - that computer games are part of a new, cognitively complex media landscape, that is in fact increasing our IQ and cognitive flexibility. You can read about this here:

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2006/03/70487

and here:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/flynn.html?pg=1&topic=flynn&topic_set=

and indeed, here:

http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000687.php


"Fearfighter" is a program which "delivers" CBT over the internet - which you can read about here:

http://www.fearfighter.com/index.htm


You can read a less complimentary view of computer games here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2164065/

There is also a lot of interesting research going on about social networking websites and the like. It is interesting that there is a definite generational difference here. I am just too old to really "get" myspace and the like (and definitely too old for Bebo!) whereas the majority of you guys are presumably beboing away like mad. Whether this will have long term effects on social interaction or not, I don't know!