Hi all,
Hope you enjoyed Thursday's lectures. Apologies for any confusion about the various questionnaires we sent around. Basically we are seeing if a) doing the psychiatry rotation and b) having the "Psychiatry and Society" lectures themselves lead to a change in attitudes among medical students to psychiatry as a career, as well as a change in attitude to mental illness. So we have been doing some questionnaires with the current group of students doing psychiatry as a rotation, which overlaps with what we handed out on Thursday. We are also doing more qualitative work on the Psychiatry and Society lectures. I'll post more about these in due course.
Hope my little bit about the essays was clear enough. As I said, don't be too intimidated about having to do essays on psychiatry and society topics. The essays will be very general. The more you can use material from the lectures to inform your essay, the better.
I hope you enjoyed Liam Delaney's presentation. The Geary Institute maintain their own blog (linked to on the right, but in any case the link is here: http://gearybehaviourcenter.blogspot.com/) There is lots of exciting work going on at the interface between economics and psychiatry. As Liam said, in the recent past economists tended to ignore the less economically tangible (ie less readily expressible in monetary terms!) aspects of human happiness (although in the more distant past economists were very aware of them) - however now this is changing.
Economists are also more aware that a population with a high prevalence of mental illness is a less productive one. We tend to have an image of capitalism as this ruthless, impersonal system which works "best" when taking the least account of the consequences. This might seem a total tangent (and a distraction coming up to the first half of the finals!) but I'd recommend to anyone interested a book called "The Writing On the Wall" by Will Hutton - which is mainly about the rise of China as an economic, military and political power, but also contains much eye-opening (for me anyway) stuff on how modern theorists are realising that, to work well, market economies need strong, independent institutions (some of which may seem to have a raison d'etre contradictory to capitalism) such as a free press, an independent judiciary, mechanisms to regulate banking and financial services etc. (and I might add, an independent medcial profession)
I missed some of the Pavee Point presentation for various logistic reasons. I would be interested to know what people made of it - both Irish and non-Irish. Certainly it helped open my eyes to the viewpoint of a group in our society almost entirely excluded from public discourse except in bad news stories, as some kind of problem to be solved by the rest of society. It was refreshing to hear travelling people speaking for themselves. I think as a presentation it may have seemed little heavy on the structure of services etc. One thing you realise when you begin working is that a lot of those things that seem either trivially obvious or boring (or both) when you are a student about teams being "multidisciplinary", about "consultation", and about the structure of the health system and services, becomes very relevant very quickly. So right now this kind of stuff seems dull (trust me, I know!) but it is important to get a sense of its importance)
Someone once told me that we should all do management courses, because management have so much control of our working lives that we should have some idea of where they are coming from - and their uniquely boring and opaque use of language!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Friday, August 31, 2007
Back
Hi all,
The next lectures are on September 20th. The lecturers are Liam Delaney from the Geary Institute in UCD and speakers from Pavee Point. Attendance will be taken.
I'll also outline the structure of the essay paper on the 20th, between the lectures.
See you then,
Seamus
The next lectures are on September 20th. The lecturers are Liam Delaney from the Geary Institute in UCD and speakers from Pavee Point. Attendance will be taken.
I'll also outline the structure of the essay paper on the 20th, between the lectures.
See you then,
Seamus
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Small Group Needed
Hi all,
We are hoping to do some work with small groups to assess how the lecture series went and did it change any of your minds about psychiatry in any way. If you would be even vaguely interested, email me at seamus.macsuibhne@ucd.ie and I'll be in touch.
Hope the summer is going well wherever you are - and I hope to see you all (and I mean all) in September safe and well!
Seamus
We are hoping to do some work with small groups to assess how the lecture series went and did it change any of your minds about psychiatry in any way. If you would be even vaguely interested, email me at seamus.macsuibhne@ucd.ie and I'll be in touch.
Hope the summer is going well wherever you are - and I hope to see you all (and I mean all) in September safe and well!
Seamus
Friday, June 1, 2007
Yesterday....
Hi all,
Hope you enjoyed the presentations yesterday - those of you who showed up! Perhaps I'll reveal my ruthless authoritarian streak to ensure better attendance in the Autumn (for we'll have no lectures on June 21st - in September things will kick off again!)
I had to go off myself for a clinic before Prof Malone and Seamus McGuinness' presentation - I'd hope to have something online from them before too long. I hope you found Joe Little's presentation stimulating - it was perhaps more an overview of a journalistic career and the intersection with mental illness in various stories that he covered, rather than a more didactic lecture.
There was lots to think about as a result of the presentation - in particular the realisation that in Ireland we are not all that far away, either in terms of time or distance, from a long-term ethnic conflict which rumbled on for centuries. We tend to forget how ingrained trauma can become. I remember being told (sorry I have no more reliable source than this) that many of the population of Belgrade are still on benzodiazapenes following the NATO bombings of 1999. I was also reminded of another thing I was told (clearly I'm not in evidence based medicine mode today!) that one of the consequences of the Famine and the century-and-a-half economic malaise which followed in Ireland was that Irish males tended to either emigrate of stay around doing very little, setting up a dynamic of Irish males being either hardworking but absent, or feckless but present - which has had knock-on effects on their interpersonal relationships to this day.
The other thing I took from Joe's presentation was this tension between protecting people and respecting their rights - for instance when he talked about the exposé of illegal moneylenders in the 1980s, and the reaction from some quarters that people should be allowed go to hell in a handcart if that's what they desire. This is the sort of tension we see in compulsory detention, for instance, and perhaps it goes to the heart of psychiatry. Unlike most psychiatrists (I reckon) I tend towards the libertarian end of the spectrum, but on the other hand no one can spend much time in psychiatry without realising that there are lots of people who are vulnerable to scams and frauds and do need protection. For instance, a lot of those fraudulent lotteries and get-rich-quick schemes that most of us just delete from our Inbox or go straight to the recycling bin, and read and taken up by people with cognitive impairment or learning disability.
I guess this tension is increasingly at the heart of politics too - we have gone from a left-right dichotomy to a more libertarian-authoritarian spectrum.
Anyway enjoy the weekend, see the current students next week and see the rest of you in September!
Seamus
Hope you enjoyed the presentations yesterday - those of you who showed up! Perhaps I'll reveal my ruthless authoritarian streak to ensure better attendance in the Autumn (for we'll have no lectures on June 21st - in September things will kick off again!)
I had to go off myself for a clinic before Prof Malone and Seamus McGuinness' presentation - I'd hope to have something online from them before too long. I hope you found Joe Little's presentation stimulating - it was perhaps more an overview of a journalistic career and the intersection with mental illness in various stories that he covered, rather than a more didactic lecture.
There was lots to think about as a result of the presentation - in particular the realisation that in Ireland we are not all that far away, either in terms of time or distance, from a long-term ethnic conflict which rumbled on for centuries. We tend to forget how ingrained trauma can become. I remember being told (sorry I have no more reliable source than this) that many of the population of Belgrade are still on benzodiazapenes following the NATO bombings of 1999. I was also reminded of another thing I was told (clearly I'm not in evidence based medicine mode today!) that one of the consequences of the Famine and the century-and-a-half economic malaise which followed in Ireland was that Irish males tended to either emigrate of stay around doing very little, setting up a dynamic of Irish males being either hardworking but absent, or feckless but present - which has had knock-on effects on their interpersonal relationships to this day.
The other thing I took from Joe's presentation was this tension between protecting people and respecting their rights - for instance when he talked about the exposé of illegal moneylenders in the 1980s, and the reaction from some quarters that people should be allowed go to hell in a handcart if that's what they desire. This is the sort of tension we see in compulsory detention, for instance, and perhaps it goes to the heart of psychiatry. Unlike most psychiatrists (I reckon) I tend towards the libertarian end of the spectrum, but on the other hand no one can spend much time in psychiatry without realising that there are lots of people who are vulnerable to scams and frauds and do need protection. For instance, a lot of those fraudulent lotteries and get-rich-quick schemes that most of us just delete from our Inbox or go straight to the recycling bin, and read and taken up by people with cognitive impairment or learning disability.
I guess this tension is increasingly at the heart of politics too - we have gone from a left-right dichotomy to a more libertarian-authoritarian spectrum.
Anyway enjoy the weekend, see the current students next week and see the rest of you in September!
Seamus
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
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!
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!
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