Some interesting stuff to read including snowflake bullies, non-racist football, child mental health and why public health lie all the time

****

Bullies with a cause - exploring the 'snowflake fascists':

To make matters worse, among “the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity,” according to psychologists Erik L. Westby and V.L. Dawson, is that “teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.” Although teachers report they value creativity, these nonconformist children who act and think differently and don’t quite fit in—the children most in need of teachers’ support and protection—are, research reveals, teachers’ least favorite students.

Rod Liddle on form as he discusses why football isn't racist whereas middle-class professions are (and has a go at Beyonce):

It’s not just Millwall, mind — football has done extraordinarily well in accustoming the white folks to divest themselves of racial prejudice. It is still the focus of anti-racist odium from the middle-class liberal left, of course, which despises what it sees as a lowbrow white working-class leisure pursuit. And yet there were more black players on Millwall’s books in 1975 than there were black journalists on the Guardian’s staff. A greater proportion of black footballers then and now than black academics, black lawyers, black MPs, black educationalists, black social workers — name your middle-class profession and the answer will be the same. And black Britons thrived in the same trades as those working-class supporters on the terraces — as electricians, plumbers, labourers.

Frank Furedi in challenging mode as he discusses mental health and children:

Confused and insecure children are likely to be diagnosed as depressed or traumatised. Virtually any energetic or disruptive youngster can acquire the label of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Youngsters who give their teachers a hard time or argue with adults are likely to get stuck with the label of oppositional defiant disorder.

The proliferation of new medicalised categories with which to label school pupils says far more about the inventive powers of the therapeutic imagination than the conditions of childhood. Pupils who suffer from shyness are offered the diagnosis of social phobia. The diagnosis of school phobia can now be applied to label those children who really dislike going to school.

And Chris Snowden explaining slowly and carefully why public health lies all the time about drinking:

The graph represents the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality. It is, I think, well known that the relationship is J-shaped. This particular J-curve is based on 34 prospective epidemiological studies which collect data on how much people drink and then follow them over a period of years with a view to seeing if they die and what they die of. As this graph shows, the risk of death declines substantially at low levels of alcohol consumption and then rises, but it does not reach the level of a teetotaller until the person is consuming somewhere between 40 and 60 grams of alcohol a day, which is to say between 35 and 50 units a week.

Here's a canter through the weird and wonderful world of consumer apps (this Uber for everything!):

Valet Anywhere will find you and park your car for you. Dufl will pack and ship your bags for you. Zingy, Barkpost, Wag! and FetchPetCare all offer on-demand dog-walking. Over the holidays, I received a breathless pitch for Thirstie, an app billed as a “discovery-to-delivery platform that allows you to stock up on last-minute wine, beer and spirits under an hour.” (Lest you think Thirstie has cornered its market, it’s locked in a Coke-Pepsi-style battle with its arch rival, Saucey.)

Meanwhile the Adam Smith Institute are running against the tide on migration - a welcome challenge to the media-led shouting:

The best international development policy would be to let in more workers from the third world in to work in Britain, according to a new paper from the Adam Smith Institute. Politicians should stop trying to save entire countries with foreign aid programmes and instead help their inhabitants by letting them move to developed countries, it says.

Finally, this is a really great idea:

Using this LoT (Locator of Things) technology, Pixie has basically created a network of items that can correspond and even talk which each other. This does not only create a ‘smart household’, but it also adds potential smart technology to the city. Add a pixie to your bicycle and find it back easily. Let your car give you a sign when you forgot to bring your driver license. Or add a Pixie to your shopping cart and let it find a your pre-set shopping list.

....

"It's not an ideology, dear, it's a mental illness": On the medicalisation of brainwashing

We all sort of know about brainwashing - it features in dystopic SF movies and is the sort of thing that dodgy religious cults get up to. It sits in the same box as 'gay cures' and the scarier end of drug-abuse therapy - something that's probably causing more mental health damage that any good (assuming there was good in the first place).

Watch out as the use of these techniques become medicalised - because 'extremism' and 'fundamentalism' are not matters of agency but involuntary consequences of socialisation or 'brainwashing':

Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness.

Read through what this researcher is saying. Read it carefully. It's not pretty is it? Dr Taylor goes on:

She said that radicalizing ideologies may soon be viewed not as being of personal choice or free will but as a category of mental disorder. She said new developments in neuroscience could make it possible to consider extremists as people with mental illness rather than criminals.

She told The Times of London: "One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated. Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology -- we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance."

OK you say - this is about saving people who have been brainwashed by the cult (perhaps up to and including paying £3 to join the Labour Party so as to vote for Jeremy Corbyn). But it's a good thing - we'll be treating the ill you see:

"I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

This is a recipe for a state-determined definition of 'normal' with anyone holding views that are outside the norm and defined as 'harmful' categorized as mentally ill. This is the medicalisation of brainwashing with the intention of treating the ill-effects of the wrong kind of ideology or belief.

On a much larger and potentially more fruitful scale is the recognition that the entire domain of religious beliefs, political convictions, patriotic nationalist fervor are in themselves powerful platforms for nurturing "Us vs Them" paranoid delusional fantasies which work out destructively in a 9/11 attack or a Hiroshima/Nagasaki orgy of mass destruction.

Frightening eh?

....

Banning smoking at mental health units. A rant at Bradford's health fascists.

Bradford NHS Care Trust decided to ban smoking everywhere on its sites in Bradford.

A BLANKET ban on smoking has come into force at Lynfield Mount psychiatric hospital in Bradford.

Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust said the ban also affected all its buildings, grounds and vehicles, including the Airedale Centre for Mental Health at Airedale Hospital at Steeton, Keighley.

Nicola Lees, deputy chief executive and director of nursing at the Trust, said the decision had been taken to help patients' mental health as well as theirs and staff's physical health.

This decision has been presented uncritically in the local paper and is accompanied by almost congratulatory quotations from Public Health England.

Let's be clear about this - it is a ghastly, unnecessary and illiberal attack on the rights of mental health patients. These are vulnerable people - they're not in the Care Trust's units for fun, they're there because they want (or need - some are in a secure unit under the provisions of the Mental Health Acts) help with mental health problems. And let's also be clear that forcing them to quit smoking (and this is exactly what the Trust is doing) makes little or no contribution to resolving their mental health problems - indeed, for some, it might even make them worse.

This decision isn't a substantive contribution to bettering the health of Bradford people. Rather, it's a nasty, spiteful and thoughtless piece of tick-box public health introduced by people who care more about being seen to be righteous than they do about the well-being of mental health patients. There is no health and safety justification (it's a ban outside where passive smoking risks are zero), merely a sad conformity with the English NHS's growing attachment of health fascism.

Don't these patients have some rights left. Rights to make their own choice as adults about whether or not to smoke? It would appear not - the health fascists have won again.

....

Shooting the messenger - doctors, smoking and mental health

Today the BBC is reporting on the latest press release from The Doctors:

The NHS in England is not doing enough to help people with mental health conditions quit smoking, an influential group of doctors has warned. 

The influential group (and to think I was kind to them just this morning on the radio) is the Royal College of Physicians aided and abetted in this case by the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies at Nottingham University. The top professor there had this to say about the mentally ill and smoking:

"The patients are seen as having a hard time and are ill so they need a cigarette and it is also a way for staff to build relationships and so they end up facilitating smoking breaks, finding time to supervise people who want to go outside to smoke, rather than spending resources on helping them to stop."

It seems to me that these influential doctors are doing the worst thing possible - focusing on something that is less harmful out of ideology. Rather than treating the mental illness, The Doctors tell us we must first stop the mentally ill from smoking - must spend "resources" on this rather than treating the mental health problem.

Perhaps, in an idle break from their nannying fussbucketry, the influential doctors might consider why people with mental health problems are more likely to smoke? Have these so-called "doctors" not thought for a second that, for someone with severe depression for example, a fag is a welcome little lift?

But no. Instead these supposed doctors want to take away another little pleasure, to regiment and control what the mentally ill do as if they're not able - with support - to live their own lives and make their own choices. And what makes matters worse is that those who claim advocacy on behalf of the mentally ill fail completely to tell The Doctors to shut up and treat the mental health problems. But MIND simply make a knee-jerk 'mentally ill people's needs aren't being met' statement - a complete failure considering that they had the chance to set matters straight.

The needs of those mentally ill people is support - whether medical or social - to allow them to lead a fuller live. And when that's done perhaps helping them to quit smoking has a chance of succeeding. In the meantime can we stop shooting the messenger and focus instead on the thing that means mentally ill people have such a lower life expectancy - their mental illness.

....

Friday Fungus: Mushrooms, psychedelia and depression

These days we are trained from our youth to respond with terror to the idea of psychedelic drugs - including our dear old friend the magic mushroom. However, we need to keep an open mind - to keep in mind the possible benefits of these substances. And since - as far as we know - nobody has died from eating magic mushrooms, they seem a fair place to start. And here's New Scientist reporting on research into the effect of using mushrooms:

Psychedelic drug users throughout the ages have described their experiences as mind-expanding. They might be surprised, therefore, to hear that psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – actually decreases blood flow as well as connectivity between important areas of the brain that control perception and cognition.

The same areas can be overactive in people who suffer from depression, making the drug a potential treatment option for the condition.

The study is the first time that psilocybin's effects have been measured with fMRI, and the first experiment involving a hallucinogenic drug and human participants in the UK for decades.

Leaving aside the issue of hallucinogenic effects, the piece suggests that the real benefit does not lie with this immediate effect:

Franz Vollenweider, who works in a similar field at the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, says that the immediate effects of psilocybin are not as important for clinical benefit as the longer-term effects. That's because psilocybin increases the expression of genes and signalling proteins associated with nerve growth and connectivity, he says: "We think that the antidepressant effects of psilocybin may be due to a possible increase of factors that activate long-term neuroplasticity."

We tend to associate drug use with the onset of mental health problems - the oft told link between cannibis use and schizophrenia, for example - so it is good to see the other side of the story. Indeed, drugs such as nicotine are also beneficial in providing a small stimulus - how many folk will tell you how a fag and a coffee act to get things going! Perhaps, the prevalence of drug use among people with mental health problems is them searching for remedies or for methods to cope?

....

The impact of the smoking ban on the old...

****

For all my opposition to the smoking ban, I never really thought about how it would create loneliness, depression and illness in the old. Here's one real example (lifted from here): 

“I am getting too old to stand outside pubs or restaurants. Plus I was taught that it was only 'ladies of the night' that stood in the street smoking. 

I have been 3 years away from any social contact other than the odd hello with neighbours. 

Being a widow with no family it was always going to be hard to get back into some semblance of normality with regard to socialising, but I didn't think that it would be this bad.

I used to meet up in a cafeteria with some lady friends, but now that has stopped as a few of the ladies were smokers and didn't want to stand in the street to have a cigarette. 

I went to a quiz night at the local pub as there were quite a few elderly 'singles' there. That has stopped. I also played bingo once a week and that too has stopped as there is no pleasure in having a drink there with no cigarette. 

I am now on anti depressants and wish that I had the courage to kill myself and join my dear husband.

Thank you politicians for making my life not worth living after working from age 14 until 68. I am now 74 and have lost my soul and will to live in this lonely place.”

Depression, loneliness, even suicide - what have we done to these poor folk with our insistence on a total ban. The 'Freedom2Choose' site records a dozen of so examples - real examples of real people with their pleasure destroyed by the smoking ban. Plus this comment from some kid:

“OMG these ladies are my nans age and its people who are younger than them who made these horrible laws that make them stand out in the cold and they should be ashamed at throwing their parents in the street, my nan smokes and says she would rather be at home and i thought it was because she was old but now i think its because she dont want to stand in the street, i cried when i read this letter and wish that my nan could go out to see people and not sit indoors unhappy, they are bastards who do this to old people.”

....