Day 951

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Who? The young.

1 in 6 people is an adolescent. More than 3000 adolescents die every day from largely preventable causes, according to a new report from WHO and partners. That amounts to 1.2 million deaths per year. Many key risk factors for future adult disease start or are consolidated in adolescence. Adolescent mental health and well-being are often overlooked.

In 2015, more than two-thirds of these deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries in Africa and South-East Asia. Road traffic injuries, lower respiratory infections, and suicide are the biggest causes of death among adolescents.

Most of these deaths can be prevented with good health services, education and social support. But in many cases, adolescents who suffer from mental health disorders, substance use, or poor nutrition cannot obtain critical prevention and care services – either because the services do not exist, or because they do not know about them.

“Adolescents have been entirely absent from national health plans for decades,” says Dr Flavia Bustreo, Assistant Director-General, WHO. “Relatively small investments focused on adolescents now will not only result in healthy and empowered adults who thrive and contribute positively to their communities, but it will also result in healthier future generations, yielding enormous returns.”

Suicide and accidental death from self-harm were the third cause of adolescent mortality in 2015, resulting in an estimated 67 000 deaths. Self-harm largely occurs among older adolescents, and globally it is the second leading cause of death for older adolescent girls. It is the leading or second cause of adolescent death in Europe and South-East Asia.

“Improving the way health systems serve adolescents is just one part of improving their health,” says Dr Anthony Costello, Director, Child and Adolescent Health, WHO. “Parents, families, and communities are extremely important, as they have the greatest potential to positively influence adolescent behaviour and health.”

At long last, the world is waking up and so is the World Health Organisation.

Podcast:
In conversation with Meera S and Dr George at Business FM, Malaysia:

Doctor in the house: Adolescent Health

Day 950

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Let me not defer…

Rush hour in London is a perfect example of organised chaos. Buses, cycles, pedestrians, taxis and cars miss each other by millimetres and head purposefully towards their respective destinations. The sun shone generously this morning, throwing light on every minute detail.

He sat on the edge of a low shop window on York Road. I saw him on my way from the bus-stop to the hospital. He sat there holding his head in both his hands – the classic pose. He must have been in his mid-twenties. There was darkness in his eyes, a small blue travel bag by his right foot. Not sure if he spoke English. He didn’t look drunk. I walked past him. I wanted to stop and talk to him but I knew this could take time and I would get late for work. I kept walking. Hundred yards ahead, I turned around and looked. He was still there. Still in the same position. Something needed attention. I thought I would quickly go to work, see if I could be spared and come back asap.
I did exactly that. I came back after 40 minutes but he was gone.

What could I have done? There are so many people, each one with their own problems and stories. What difference can I make?

I can ask – Are you ok? Can I help you?
I can offer my phone if they want to make a call.
I can have a phone number handy – 0808 800 4444 (Shelter)
I can have the belief that there is something I can do.

Postponing a positive action is a sure way of missing the entire fleet.
I was unaware that every day 150 families in Britain become homeless.

Day 949

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Iatrogenic

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Antipsychiatry – I knew the sentiment but I didn’t know the word.
Dr Bonnie Burstow has helped hundreds of “highly suicidal patients,” as a psychotherapist. She’s come to believe that conventional psychiatric treatment isn’t in their best interests.

For half a century, scholars have been looking closely at Psychiatry as a coercive instrument of oppression. Dr Burstow is a prominent figure in the field of antipsychiatry, which she describes as “a movement of both psychiatric survivors and professionals saying that we need to abolish psychiatry”. She’s the author of “Psychiatry and the Business of Madness” and “The Myth of Mental Illness”.

“Longitudinal studies have shown that people who go off their drugs after a few years do better in the long run than people who stay on them. But guess who does the best of all? The people who were never on them in the first place. So, then the answer is, no one should be on them in the first place. These are not medical substances. They do not address a single chemical imbalance. They, in fact, cause imbalances and not surprisingly they cause all sorts of problems for people who can then never get off them because they now have a disordered brain that is caused by the medical profession. You know I spend a lot of time building up that and showing how it happened. But once you take in that position, it is a very convincing argument for abolition.

Since the 19^th century, psychiatry has been defrauding vulnerable people. There was dunking people in cold water. There was rotating people in chairs. There was also opium. There was bleeding. Remember we had bleeding for a long time. There was also genital mutilation, just don’t forget they thought madness was being caused by masturbation.”

The University of Toronto has recently started a scholarship in Antipsychiatry. It is a historical breakthrough and hopefully a precursor to a better society. It signals to the world that this field of inquiry has come of age.

Day 944

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The Great Master

All I manage to read these days are short stories. Partly due to my abbreviated attention span and partly because the time has come when I ‘should’ start wearing reading glasses but I don’t. I get by, by increasing the font size and by reading for short periods of time. Also by squinting a lot.

‘The First Forty nine stories’ is a collection by the Nobel prize winner, Earnest Hemingway. In the preface he says, “In going where you have to go and doing what you have to do and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and out a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

After devouring the collection, I read up about him and was saddened to find that he suffered with depression and died of suicide. Here’s an example of the sensitivity and vulnerability of his characters and the simplicity of his story telling style. It’s called ‘Cat in the rain’.

Day 942

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My optimism is foolish

For more than 25 years, I have practised anaesthesia. One would think that by now I would know for sure that procedures take much longer than they are scheduled for and that every list these days is overbooked. Still, foolishly I hope to finish in time every day. Even though I have had to cancel after-work plans on many occasions, at every new opportunity I want to give a chance to the possibility of a desirable outcome.

When Saagar was ill, I was optimistic. I believed that he would get better. That it was only a matter of time. The messages I got from professionals reaffirmed that belief. My faith in life and confidence in Saagar and myself kept that belief strong.

Now when I am with worried parents and friends, I hold their uncertainty and mine. Things can go one of many ways. We don’t know. We just need to be with that uncomfortable uncertainty with positivity. That is compassion. Understanding.

In quantum physics, Heisenberg’s principle of Uncertainty says that there is an inherent uncertainty in the amount of energy involved in quantum processes and in the time it takes for those processes to happen. Vacuums are often defined as the absence of everything. But not so in quantum theory. It is possible that for very, very short periods of time, a quantum system’s energy can be highly uncertain, so much that particles can appear out of a vacuum. This is well within the laws of quantum physics, as long as the particles only exist fleetingly and disappear when their time is up. Uncertainty, then, is nothing to worry about in quantum physics and, in fact, we wouldn’t be here if this principle didn’t exist.

“One misconception is that entrepreneurs love risk. Actually, we all want things to go as we expect. What you need is a blind optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty.”

-Drew Houston