Uncategorized

Day 797

Posted by

1

My generation is the last one to have grown up in a world without screens. Being an army family we were often stationed at faraway places in India where the TV signal was too faint to be picked up. It was an occasional luxury to see a snowy screen in black and white that showed a hazy picture after much manipulation of the rooftop aerial and imploring of the Gods. Our neighbours were kind about sharing their big black telephone with us in case of an important call.

One day a magic box called the ‘cassette player’ arrived. It was a source of great pleasure as we could listen to songs of our choice as and when we liked as opposed to waiting for them to be played on the radio.

A radio that was presented to my parents at their wedding travelled with me to medical school. All through my time there I planned my life around it. My favourite station, All India Radio Urdu Service finished broadcasting at half past 12 at night and hence bedtime was 1 am. By the end of my 5 and a half years there, I had to use sharpened matchsticks to enable the worn little bandwidth buttons to maintain electrical contact. I depended on it. It was my most prized possession, my window to the world.

I remember standing in queues to make phone calls from a manned telephone booth without a door or walls. At the time it wasn’t fun as my side of the conversation was easily audible to all present. There was no time or space for small talk as I was most aware of everyone around especially those awaiting their turn.

That was a beautiful world and so is this. Now it’s so wonderfully easy to stay connected with people all over the world, to share our thoughts and ideas. Our screens can be our windows to the world and allow us to connect across previously unfathomable distances. It has been a blessing for me to be able to share Saagar with you. Thank you for walking with me.

Day 796

Posted by

0

Who said hard work won’t kill you?

They have a specific term for it in Japan – ‘Karoshi’.
It means death from overwork. One fifth of the workforce in Japan is at risk of it. 2000 people die of work related stress every year and many others due to heart attacks, strokes, suicides and other serious health problems, giving rise to resignations, law suits and calls to tackle the problem. Japanese salarymen work significantly longer hours than their counterparts in other modern economies.

Ichiro Oshima, a 24-year-old Dentsu (an advertising firm with a notorious reputation) employee, killed himself in 1991 in Japan’s first recognised case of karoshi-related suicide. Oshima had not had a day off for 17 months and was sleeping for less than two hours a night before his death.

The number of suicides and attempted suicides in the City of London (the financial district) has doubled in the first 8 months of this year, particularly from bridges. Could that have something to do with the brutally competitive atmosphere in the Square Mile? Officers are making more use of Section 136 of the Mental Health Act to take people to a place of safety, usually a hospital. Ambulances are often unavailable so officers resort to using police vans, almost criminalising people by transporting them thus. Invariably when patients are assessed they are not deemed to meet the threshold of admission to a mental hospital and released. Police are asking NHS Trusts to provide details of patients so they know if they have been released so that they can be put a plan in place to safeguard them.

City police have also set up a Bridges Working Group including officials from NHS mental health trusts, the Samaritans, the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) and the Coastguard.

Only a small percentage of employers in the UK have family-friendly policies or personal support services in place so as to achieve a good work-life balance. Although it is improving, we still have a long way to go.

Ref: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/29/head-of-japans-top-ad-firm-to-quit-after-new-recruits-death-from-overwork?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Email

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/18/death-from-overwork-japans-karoshi-culture-blamed-young-mans-heart-failure

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/08/japan-one-fifth-of-employees-at-risk-of-death-from-overwork-report

https://www.rethink.org/living-with-mental-illness/police-courts-prison/section-136-police-taking-you-to-a-place-of-safety-from-a-public-place

Day 795

Posted by

0

As I read this piece of research, I could see Saagar and me reflected in it. It rang true. It gave me a deeper understanding about myself, my humanity and the precious fragility of our closest relationships. This qualitative research by Prof Christabel Owens et al tries to understand the needs of concerned family members and friends that can better equip them to intervene when their loved one is suicidal or in distress. It focuses on micro-social systems, like families or a group of friends as opposed to macro systems like nations and societies. (http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5801)
Microsociology is the study of thoughts, feelings, moods, behaviours and forms of language that serve to maintain or threaten bonds between individuals.

Life is lived in small units – husband and wife, mother and son, boy-friend and girl-friend and so on. This is the level at which suicidal crises unfold and are managed, very often without any help from clinical services.

Family members and friends are the real frontline of suicide prevention but little is known about what goes on in these settings. A series of narrative interviews with the next of kin of 14 young people lost by suicide were analysed : What did they see and hear? What did they think was happening? What actions did they take and why? What additional knowledge, skills and support would have been useful?

Findings:

  1. Warning signs were rarely clear at the time. For example, one dad of a 19 year old boy said,“He had a teddy bear hanging from a light cord in his bed room.” In retrospect, the signs were clear but at the time, they were offset by countersigns or were difficult to decipher, open to a range of interpretations.
  2. Significant others engaged in normalizing and legitimizing their behavior. For example, a mother of a 29 years old man said, ”A few times he rang me in the early hours of the morning absolutely piddled out of his head and he’d be gabbling on but I couldn’t understand a word he was saying because he was drunk. I’d say, “Look, I’ll come and see you tomorrow and we’ll talk about it then.” I’d go there and nothing would get said and he’d seem alright.” In almost all cases, more weight was given to countersigns. The boundaries of normality were stretched to accommodate a loved one so as to avoid ‘pathologising’ or labeling them as that may be perceived as rejection.
  3. Fear (of loss) prevented them from saying or doing anything that might have prevented tragedy. For example, the partner of a 26 years old woman said, “I was trying to find the right words to persuade her to go to the GP. It’s bloody difficult and I was afraid she’d react badly. The situation was delicate and I had an awful lot to loose. And I ended up loosing it anyway.”

The article concluded that these are highly complex decisions. Due to a deep emotional involvement, we often cannot think and act in a rational manner. These findings are now being used to devise emotionally informed suicide prevention efforts, as opposed to cognitive ones which are most commonly used. These methods will help people like you and me to acknowledge and overcome our fears and act appropriately.

So far this leaflet had emerged as a result of this study:

Click to access UoA2_leaflet.pdf

Day 794

Posted by

0

Spending a few days in the countryside has brought out some stark differences from London.

No one walks with head/ear phones on in the countryside.
People greet others even if they don’t know them.
Even though people live far away from each other, they feel connected.
The abundance of nature allows for a free flow of energy as opposed to the rigid urban boxed-in compartmentalisation leading to desperate loneliness and isolation.

Last month I heard that as a man stood in despair at the edge of a tall building contemplating a jump, onlookers egged him on, poised with their cameras. Once I got over the initial shock of the implications of this fact, I began to wonder whether people had truly lost their compassion and empathy or whether they were unable to differentiate between real and virtual worlds. Are the lines between these two worlds too blurred for some of us? Do screens dominate our lives to the extent that unless it’s happening on a screen, it’s not happening? And if it’s happening on a screen it’s not real anyway?

“The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. When you are inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds we are trying to save. Until we do, these people are part of that system and that makes them our enemies. You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many are so hopelessly dependent on the system, they will fight to protect it. The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

– Morpheus, in the movie, “The Matrix”

Day 793

Posted by

0

“Take a left and the M2 is right there. You can’t miss it”, said the man giving me directions. He had no idea what I was capable of missing. When I reached Bangor, I knew something was wrong. I stopped the car in a lay-by, rolled the window down and asked someone walking their dogs, “Can you please tell me the way to Antrim?” They tried unsuccessfully to hide their shock and amusement, asked me to turn around and go about 20 miles in the other direction on the M2.

Left and right is manageable but east and west is a bit much. North and south add further complications. My emotional and physical dependence on the Tom-tom is apparent from the panicked state I get into when it decides not to play. I feel abandoned without it. I can proudly claim to have successfully managed to go round in circles, despite a working sat-nav. Communication gaps between man and machine are inevitable. The small advantage is that the machine is not programmed to yell at me when I make a mistake. In a zen-like manner it states ‘recalculating’.

That’s our code. Si and I have chosen it as the most appropriate declaration at times of misunderstandings. It is a way of buying time, naming and identifying the probability of approaching danger. Luckily we haven’t had to use it much.

“Recalculating!!!”