Archive of Analects 2005
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January/February 05
1. "To put people who are psychologically damaged, who are psychotic, in such a thing is cruelty of an order people just can't believe" - a volunteer at the South Australian Baxter Detention Centre Feb 8, 2005. SANE Australia's helpline 1800 688 382, if member of family is affected by mental illness. SANE's general help on line. Immigration detention in Amnesty's view.
"Many suffered from psychological ailments. Society became with every new decree ..... more and more hostile. There were even whispers coming from England that the Nazi’s were planning and executing the total extinction of the Jewish race. It is no small wonder that in this climate of fear, hate, distrust and paranoia many Jews suffered from panic disorders and depressions. Etty also did not feel too well in 1941." More about Etty Hillesum and her breath taking diary from a Durchgangslager detention centre where she voluntarily placed herself knowing her fate.
"The relevant act (Migration Act 1958). . . refers to having a belief that someone is an unlawful non-citizen." Senator Vanstone. Just a small step to a non-person - 'unless a person is assaulted, no crime has been committed'
Detention centres are an expression of a society stuck at learning basic trust and mistrust - Stage 1 in Erickson's model of human development. In our incredible response to disasters from WWI to the Tsunami we express the very best in us as a nation that of Stage 7 - "generativity is an extension of love into the future. It is a concern for the next generation and all future generations. As such, it is considerably less "selfish" than the intimacy of the previous stage: Intimacy, the love between lovers or friends, is a love between equals, and it is necessarily reciprocal." Like each of us and every nation - we are full of impossible contradictions.
2. 'Oh, we have a home. We just need a house to put it in.' - a ten-year-old homeless Tsunami girl.
'The tsunami offered little comfort for traditional theists who believed in God as a kind of cosmic puppeteer. But those who believed that God was both in the wave and on the beach, among the dead and the survivors, could draw hope and comfort of God's omnipresence.' Revd Dr Andrew McGowan. And an Islamic view, 'I am owned by God. I come from God I will return to God.'
A counselling hotline has been established by Centrelink to offer professional help, personal support services, financial assistance and medical advice to survivors and victims families. Call 1800 057 111
International Organization for Migration for displaced persons (IOM) donate online. IOM's counter trafficking page. UNICEF child exploitation and trafficking links.
3. Discovering the affair of your partner after it has been going on for 12 months 'right under your nose', and each new week revelations of the extent of betrayal are excavated, is like being stripped, shaven, thrown out of your house and home and onto the street where no rules apply, nothing to cling to and nothing makes sense. Of course you want to hurt them back as much as they have hurt you, take away all their security, dignity, sense of belonging, of purpose and of self-worth. You want to strip them bare until they have as little left to believe in as you. Wishing to inflict a tsunami on the offender is best spoken but not acted upon. Read my full article on the subject of affairs.
March/April/May 05
1. The work place is a danger zone for affairs. Read my 3 comprehensive articles or just the short stories on the subject of affairs or at least read the summary there before getting any more deeply involved in a friendship that is edging toward something more. Fill out this questionnaire to check whether your platonic office friendship is hazardous to your primary relationship.2. Ringing in the ears or tinitus. The best approach is multi-modal. Right now I am on a combo of Blood Type diet with low salicylates food and zinc supplements; exercise; internal/external jaw with full body massage (monthly); chiropractic (monthly) and beginning the Australian developed Horstmann technique (canberra contact marianne <mbglyco@yahoo.com>). Bowen Therapy is also good. A topical treatment is weekly ear candling, candles obtained from health food store. Chronic acidity and indigestion cause tightening of the jaw - that's a nutrition problem first and then psychological. You need to aim for alkaline urine, easily tested by a naturopath. Dental work is recommended particularly removing amalgam and replacing with non-toxic alernatives, adjusting the bite to settle the temporo-mandibular joint, particularly if the sufferer grinds teeth at night, has history of headache neck pain etc.. Ayurvedic medicine has a 14 day regimen for it and this includes warm black sesame oil drizzled all over the body and forehead and also pooling in the ears, together with massage and internal herbs. I haven’t gone all the way down that track partly because in my judgement the best way to do it is to go to Kerala, India and stay in one of their Ayurdvedic Hospitals for two weeks each year. Contact for that is Rama Prasad <ayurveda@acay.com.au> The person’s thoughts about and reacitivty to tinitus needs to be addressed by cogntive therapies, yoga, meditation and massage. NLP has some useful tools as well. At the next level in my case, I have identified 'holding on' and 'the scream' as my unspoken psychological process. My method here is remembering the core issues I hold on to and the times there was a powerful scream appropriate to express in my life and I couldn’t let it out and then finding a way to externalise that in my visual arts practice. EFT would also help release some of that. Have a regular check up with an Ear Nose and Throat Specialist every five years, but don't expect them to comprehend much of the above. (It takes nearly a year to get an appointment with one in Canberra)
3. Spirituality - some beginning thoughts
4. The foundations of self-esteem are with how the person was loved and cared for as a child. Care includes parent/s having the 'moral fibre' of tough love; setting clear boundaries and limits which the child tests, with a family life that does not revolve around the children. The last link to a research project commencing with 28, two parent, two income, high achieving Los Angeles families: always in motion; child-dominated; strained; losing intimacy and some of whose children are not expected to acknowledge their parents when they return home after a day at school and after-school activities chauffered by their parents.
5. National Coalition Against Bullying - an Australian clearinghouse of information, again in the news as another former student sues his prestige private school. How do we begin to sue a culture which permits even promotes it in the work place and in foreign policy?
June 05
1. 'Ask anyone in the middle of battling a catastrophic illness. Or survey all my friends from the acute trauma ward, and they will tell you they live to give a halting hug or to speak a word of grace to another. The irony can no longer be lost on me. When crisis explodes in our midst, what we yearn for is a clue to our spiritual life.' Yehuda Fine Read more from Fine and others on my spirituality page.
2. The London Depression Intervention Trial (British Journal of Psychiatry 177:95-100) found 'couple therapy', whereby a depressed person is counselled together with their non-depressed spouse, works much better than any other form of treatment for depression.
3. I'm loving reading the mindhacks blog. The contributers scour the web for material on mind and behaviour. They dug out Petra Boynton's stinging attack on so called research linking genetics to female orgasm. A great read.
July 05
1. I'm enjoying contributing to the goodtherapy site. One of my post reads as follows: Is it okay to be deeply sad for 20 years and not call it depression? Answer: Some losses are irreparable and some grieving is without end. Some lives too swiftly taken for a complete goodbye and some loves too brief to fully mend a broken heart. I think of parents who miscarry, of children lost to illness. I think of whole communities, dispossessed. Of those who act out childhood wounds whom we abandon, unforgiven. I think of this world we cling to and us, not able or not willingly to be vulnerable to those with whom we share our lives. It is appropriate and healthy to feel deep sadness about these very human conditions and for a long time because that is the tender core, which compassion chases. It calls us to our fearless, tender heart; draws us closer to this huge life; toward embracing all that is dealt us, not just toward the next hit of retail therapy. Compassion moves us to welcome it all.
To label that chest opening pain depression pathologises a right minded movement to connection or a lengthy mourning of the loss of it. True, mainstream culture hides or treats any emotional pain or grief lasting longer than a week, but clinical depression is on another trajectory. It can be described as fragility, brittleness, lack of resilience, a failure to heal, with a loss of any emotion but guilt, of any desire but to stop. Not in that definition is melancholy or deep sadness. Clinical depression carries the hopelessness of learned helplessness into a room without windows and doors, where inner light is engulfed and our support networks inacessable. Prolonged clinical depression digs pot holes into brain tissue and over a long time these are like the scaring seen in dementia brain scans. Clinical depression, however, can and ought to be treated. For example, The London Depression Intervention Trial found that couple therapy, whereby a clinically depressed person is counseled together with their non-depressed spouse, works much better than any other form of treatment including anti-depressants! Meaningful relationships and appropriate exercise are effective and singles can do both.
Sadness and depression are different again from chronic, undifferentiated unhappiness. That is the normal reaction to growing up in a dysfunctional family, especially where one or both parents suffered chronic chemical dependence (such as alcoholism) or a disabling mental disorder (such as Bi-polar) or both. However, that normal childs reaction can grow into a way of life for the adult child of those families. It doesnt eat brain tissue, it just rarely opens to joy. Sadness, depression and unhappiness are set in different attitudes and outlooks. Each require different ways of living alongside them, of joining and of awakening the resource asleep in their signal pain.
Our last freedom, said Viktor Frankl, is to choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances. Of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, he said, It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life -- daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not of talk and meditation, but of right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks that it constantly sets before each individual. in Mans Search for Meaning. After 20 years of deep sadness I think you probably know, in the tender core of you, the attitude you greet your life. Is it time for a change of mind?
2. Again anti-depressants shown to be no more effective than placebo (sugar pills). British Medical Journal 2005;331:155-157(16th July) Joanna Moncrieff, senior lecturer in social and community psychiatry, Irving Kirsch, Professor of Psychology. Here is their summary:
- Recent meta-analyses show selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have no clinically meaningful advantage over placebo.
- Claims that antidepressants are more effective in more severe conditions have little evidence to support them.
- Methodological artefacts may account for the small degree of superiority shown over placebo.
- Antidepressants have not been convincingly shown to affect the long term outcome of depression or suicide rates.
- Given doubt about their benefits and concern about their risks, current recommendations for prescribing antidepressants should be reconsidered.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recently recommended that antidepressants, in particular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, should be first line treatment for moderate or severe depression. This conclusion has broadly been accepted as valid. The message is essentially the same as that of the Defeat Depression Campaign in the early 1990s, which probably contributed to the 253% rise in antidepressant prescribing in 10 years. From our involvement in commenting on the evidence base for the guideline, we believe these recommendations ignore NICE data. The continuing concern that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors may increase the risk of suicidal behaviour means there needs to be further consideration of evidence for the efficacy of antidepressants in adults as there has been in children.
3. Anger management links:
September/October/November 2005
1. Still my favourite mind site, saves a lot of searches: Mind Hacks
2. I'm continuing to contribute to good therapy where you will find my latest article on what is good therapy
3. My bird flu pandemic defence program includes increased hygiene (wash fruit and salad veggies, hand wash before meals after pit stops, nail brush) and Buteyko breath re-training. The evidence of my physiotherapist who has been teaching it for 11 years and now my own experience is of one third of the time in usual viral respiratory and gastric illness and one third as many infections. I recommend Buteyko but I can understand why everyone hasn't taken it up. The training process to increase tolerance for CO2 in the blood stream and thus raise the set point for breath intake is physically uncomfortable and at times psychologically challenging. And it is not quick. I began earnestly in August whilst carrying the Sydney flu, lasting 8 days instead of four weeks+ My breathing is now about two thirds of the way to the final goal of 6.4% CO2. I practiced every day for initial 2 weeks for 60 minutes a day and now down to about 30 minutes every day. In addition I have an Iyenga yoga therapy program to develop a 'profound shallow breath'. The last one-third of my goal to get my Co2 level up to the perfect 6.4% will probably take the same regime for another 6 months in order to firmly establish. The huge challenge remains breath intake through nostril in speech pauses. My appearance says it all - glowingly well, warm moist skin, higher metabolic rate, lower appetite, weight loss. SARS was defeated not by a vaccine but by hygiene, quarantine and by people taking matters into their own hands.
4. Proving the connection between the symptoms of apothegmatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, Read shows that many schizophrenic symptoms are directly caused by trauma. Before proceeding any further with Read's evidence, two important caveats must be entered. Firstly, many parents of offspring with the illness may find what follows deeply upsetting or infuriating. But this is not about blame, and it is not being suggested that all cases are caused by parental care. It is also important to realise that the new evidence is far more optimistic in its implications than the psychiatric establishment's view, for patients, parents and carers alike ... The cornerstone of Read's tectonic plate-shifting evidence is the 40 studies that reveal childhood or adulthood sexual or physical abuse in the history of the majority of psychiatric patients (see, also, Read's book, Models of Madness).
5. Slow Wave is a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world, and drawn as a comic strip by Jesse Reklaw. A new strip is uploaded every week on the first minute of Saturday in San Francisco; 3 AM in Ottawa, ON; 5 AM in London, UK; and 3 PM in Sydney, Australia. Wonderful wacky dreams.
6. Predicting relationship violence: 'Vigilance the checking up on you, may be initially seen as someone who's keen on you or cares about you (indeed a potentially abusive partner may convince you and them that this is true). It may not always be easy to spot such behaviours when they start, particularly if you've got low self-esteem or a lack of confidence. A partner who always needs to know where you are, restricts your movements and who you can see, and demands proof of your whereabouts is not acting out of love for you, but out of a need to control. You cannot fix this nor should you pander to them because you want to reassure them. Over time their behaviour will worsen no matter what steps you take to try and show youre trustworthy.' quoted from Petra Boynton's blog.
December 2005
'It is timely that we give thanks for the lives of all prophets, teachers, healers and revolutionaries,
living and dead, acclaimed or obscure,
who have rebelled, worked and suffered for the cause of love and joy.
We also celebrate that part of us, that part within ourselves, which has rebelled, worked and
suffered for the cause of love and joy.
We give thanks and celebrate.' Michael Leunig (Common Prayer)
Happy Hanukka, Yuletide and queer holiday season
1. Our brain's capacity for risk assesment is not fully formed until 23 years of age. The brain spinal cord links are not fully concluded until about age 25. Try getting life insurance under 25 and you will discover that insurers have know about this for decades without having the neuroscience to back it up. Two conclusions: don't commit to a long term relationship unti both of you are over 25 and exercise the brain.
2. Sex and romance addiction links on line: Recovering couples vision. Key insights about sex compulsion. Plain Brown Wrapper mag of SAA. Dry Drunk Syndrome from Minnesota Recovery and their sex addiction links
