Nobody move or western political civilization gets it!

Emailed in by View From The Solent, from Reuters:

If Britons vote to leave the European Union in a June 23 referendum it could be the beginning of the end for the 28-nation bloc and for western political civilization more generally, European Council President Donald Tusk said.

In an interview with German newspaper Bild, Tusk said a so-called Brexit vote would provide a major boost to radical anti-European forces who he said would be "drinking champagne".

"Why is it so dangerous? Because no one can foresee what the long-term consequences would be," Tusk said. "As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilization in its entirety."

Project Fear appears to have moved so far beyond satire that it I'm starting to take it seriously again.

Clearly, I'm still not particularly worried about the negative consequences of Brexit, which will be negligible unless TPTB fuck things up deliberately to teach us a lesson, I'm now starting to worry about the sanity of all these people.

BBC or Daily Mash?

Ketamine 'exciting' depression therapy

The illegal party drug ketamine is an "exciting" and "dramatic" new treatment for depression, say doctors who have conducted the first trial in the UK.

Some patients who have faced incurable depression for decades have had symptoms disappear within hours of taking low doses of the drug.

The small trial on 28 people, reported in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, shows the benefits can last months.

Experts said the findings opened up a whole new avenue of research…

Click here to find out.

A Grand Day Out

Programme of the day

9.00 - 9.20 Registration, Tea & Coffee

9.20 - 9.40 Introduction & Chair. Professor Suman Fernando

9.40 - 10.30 Power, Identity and Mental Health: Understanding The Impact of Social Experience. Dr. Jerry Tew

10.30 - 11.20 From Personal Confusion, To Social Understanding. Professor Peter Beresford

11.20 - 11.40 Tea & Coffee

11.40 - 12.30 A Critical Realist Response to The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Professor David Pilgrim

12.30 - 12.50 Morning Q & A

12.50 - 1.50 Lunch and networking

1.50 - 2.40 Inequality Informed Mental Health Services: What Will It take? Dr. Jennie Williams

2.40 - 3.00 Tea & Coffee

3.00 - 3.50 Moving from Individualistic Monologues to Social Dialogues. Dr. Rufus May

3.50 - 4.10 Afternoon Q&A

4.10 - 4.30 Plenary, Closure & Evaluation sheets

Who Should attend?

This conference will be relevant to all interested in this field as well as all professionals, including those from Local Authorities and NHS trusts across the UK, Psychiatrists, GPs, Psychologists, Psychotherapists, Counsellors, Early Intervention Teams, CPN's, OT's, Social Workers, Chaplains, Community Faith Leaders & Healers, Equality Leads, Community Development Workers, Service User Representatives, Charities, Third Sector, Educational Establishments, Academics and Policy makers.

Where?
Oxford House,
Derbyshire Street,
Bethnal Green,
London E2 6HG

Conference Contact

Ahmed Qureshi (conference co-ordinator) tel. 07540 356 526
email us on: info@bmehealth.org or visit us on www.bmehealth.org

The wrong end of the wrong stick

From Marie Claire:

Just over 250,000 people took part in the US study, which looked at people's consumption of soft drinks, tea and coffee. Ten years later 11,311 participants aged between 50 and 71 at the start of the study were diagnosed with depression.

Researchers have said downing four cans a day raised the risk of depression by 30 per cent, with diet versions presenting the biggest problems. In comparison, drinking four cups of coffee a day makes you 10 per cent less likely to develop mental illness...

OK, these findings might be correct or not; statistically significant or not; and they say nothing about cause and effect, but hey.

Emer O’Neill, from the Depression Alliance*, said: "We’re really pleased to see that research continues to be done in order to raise awareness. Diet has a huge impact on mood and fizzy drinks, alcohol, caffeine can have a negative impact on a person’s health when consumed excessively."

Well duh.

"Excessively" means that something has a negative impact, so that's meaningless, but the survey does not mention alcohol and actually says that people who drink four cups of coffee a day are less likely to develop mental illness. Not more. Less.

* Interestingly, less than half the DA's income appears to be from the Dept of Health or NHS trusts, and they have genuine members (although it's not clear how many of their members are Big Pharma), so are they a fakecharity or not?

The DA also gets £50,000 a year from The Tudor Trust, which has £250 million of investments and splashes the cash on various righteous causes. The joke is that this trust was set up by an early owner of "the construction company George Wimpey Ltd" so it's a conscience-salving exercise as much as anything.

Why snow cheers people up.

I'm sure we've all noticed that after a snow fall, people on the street are much more cheerful and friendly to each other, sometimes partaking taking part in group activities like clearing their drives/the pavement or rather more childish or child-friendly things like building snow men, sledging or throwing snowballs.

When I popped to the shops yesterday lunchtime, I was surprised to see large groups of people just standing around chatting, despite the cold.

Part of this is down to the novelty value or the sense of 'shared hardship', but I suspect the main reason is because the fresh snow is so white and bright that it reflects all the sunlight, thus suddenly and temporarily reversing the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder by acting as a kind of 'light therapy'. During a snowfall at night, even the skies are brighter because the falling snow reflects all the urban lighting back down again.

Statistics have shown...

... that what you thought was a bit dangerous would be perfectly safe, were it not for the fact that it's a bit... er... dangerous.

NOW That's what I call a set-back!

From The Grauniad:

It was the miracle that set Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood and provided faithful followers with proof of his holy powers.

But hopes that the former pope's canonisation would be fast-tracked by Sister Marie Simon-Pierre's recovery from Parkinson's disease have been set back by reports that the French nun has fallen ill again...

Something else to worry about...

From the BBC:

A charity is calling for a nationwide campaign to protect the UK's mental health after a survey suggested people were growing ever more anxious. The poll of 2,000 adults for the Mental Health Foundation found 77% found the world more frightening than in 1999.

The charity described a "culture of fear" in which the media and politicians fuelled a sense of unease... While the economic climate was seen as part of the reason for the increased levels of fear, the charity said it believed there were other factors at play.

The report said "worst-case-scenario language" sometimes used by politicians, pressure groups, businesses and public bodies around issues such as knife-crime, MRSA, bird-flu and terrorism can have a detrimental effect on people's wellbeing.

Hats off to them for pointing out that politicians are deliberately stoking a climate of fear, a prerequisite of any authoritarian state, but just how flawed was their survey? It's always today's problems that you worry about most; you probably can't remember what you were worrying about ten years ago, and ten years ago you probably couldn't remember what you were worrying about ten years before that (OK, end of the Cold War, that was a biggie). So if they did such a survey every ten years, it would show that we get more and more worried as time goes on (which seems unlikely - by analogy, if Brand X washing powder is constantly advertised as having a 'New improved formula', how crap must it have been decades ago?).
---------------------------------------------
If anything, it's the glib use of the word charity that sets alarm bells ringing. If you download the accounts from the MHF's about us page, they only 'fess up to government grants of £372,000 out of total income of £4,274,000 (page 26), so you have to skip back to the notes to find out what their real purpose is. Ah, here we go, top of page 11...

Effective campaigning

As a founding member of the 'We Need to Talk' coalition of mental health charities we have campaigned hard for improved access to psychological therapies. Our combined efforts bore fruit on World Mental Health day in October 2007, when the Government announced a £170m investment in its Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme. We were also a partner in the first annual Psychological Therapies in the NHS conference in December 2007...

Let's pick up the trail with We Need To Talk, "a collaboration between five mental health organisations: Mental Health Foundation, Mind, Rethink, The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, Young Minds....

Mind received £2,888,000 (page 19) from the Big Lottery Fund, the Department of Health, the Financial Services Authority and the Welsh Assembly (bottom of page 21), sprinkled among the Trusts and Foundations are other government bodies such as Comic Relief, the Lloyds TSB Foundation, and the Northern Rock Foundation (pages 20 and 21), and under Companies and organisations we find the Guardian Newspaper, the Mirror Group, the Royal Bank Of Scotland, and the University of Plymouth (page 21).

Rethink received £32,244,000 (95% of their income) from 'service level agreements' (page 10), which is yet another euphemism for 'money from the government', of course.

Sainbury's seem to be almost part of the government, as I have mentioned before (point 2 here)

Young Minds received £1,283,000 (75% of their income) from 'Grants for projects and services' and 'Contracts for services' (page 19), the bulk of which was from the usual suspects - the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Department of Health, the Camelot Foundation, the Big Lottery Fund, Rethink (!) and the Lloyds TSB Foundation (page 22).

Just sayin', is all.

"Mental illness soars in UK's skunk hotspots"

Screams the headline in The Independent, continuing breathlessly,

"Some areas have suffered a tenfold increase in people mentally ill from using the drug. Nationally, skunk smokers are ending up ill in hospital in record numbers, with admissions soaring 73 per cent."

Shock! Horror! Dismay! Anguish! It then continues on a more sobre note:

"The number of adults recorded as suffering mental illness as a result of cannabis use has risen sharply from 430 in 1996 to 743 in 2006."

Wot? 743? Out of an estimated two million regular users?

That means that about one-in-three thousand regular cannabis users goes mad each year, considerably better odds than I guesstimated here, using pessimistic assumptions. The link between cannabis and mental illness is fairly tenuous anyway, see Leslie Iverson's summary halfway down this.

Further, are they distinguishing between 'cannabis' and 'skunk'? Not clear to me. Maybe all these admission are due to people smoking skunk, in which case cannabis is totally harmless.