soundtracktotodaysentryismoggio

Dear Mr Brown

As someone involved with the rehabilitation of people with severe mental health problems, I am of course ultra-interested in the long-expected announcement of cash rewards for companies that help return sick/disabled people to work.

On the face of it this looks like a good pragmatic move; however much many of us in this field have an ideological objection to private business profiteering from social security, anything which extends the help available in a crucial sector of the health and welfare systems has got to be a good thing.

[It'll probably also mean that my specific skills will get headhunted and my expected pay may rise, since I've worked in this exact area, but we'll leave that to one side for the moment.]

The devil, however, is in the detail. As ever.

Firstly, I'm concerned that the payment will only happen after six months of the person being in work. That's a very long time in Government, but it's a very short time in mental health: people's own mood cycles can be much longer. As designed, it looks like support will drop completely after that first six months: I'm concerned that there will be people who will drop through that cycle and go back onto the vicious circle of ill health and poverty that you rightly condemn. I'd prefer to see the payments drawn out over a year or two.

Secondly, although what you've designed looks like a perfect opportunity for local innovation – small businesses, co-operatives and other "social enterprise" groups acting with local knowledge and expertise to best deliver the support – I note with dismay that there's nothing to stop the big bastards muscling in.

If the cash rewards are good enough – and some of the five-figure sums per person I've seen bandied about will raise eyebrows in plc boardrooms as much as they have in mental health drop-in centres – what's to stop Tesco, Group 4, Monsanto or anyone else picking up a share of the action? I'm sure if they wanted they could hoover up every contract in the country, promising cost-cutting by overhead savings, but then what happens to all that local expertise, knowledge and goodwill?

So whilst there's a great opportunity here, there's also great danger for this system to just turn into a conveyor belt doling out money on one hand and short-term-fixed, long-term-broken individuals on the other.

I've e-mailed you this separately and I hope once the scheme is rolled out throughout the country these concerns are taken into account. After all, this is not some particular point of macroeconomic politics: this is vulnerable people's lives we're dealing with here.

Yours faithfully,

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Dear Alain De Bottom Botton,

Congratulations! At long last, after twenty years of trying, I've found a book on philosophy that didn't want to make me fall asleep / cry like a wolf / throw the book across the room and tell it to frog off.

All the ones I've read so far disappear up their own arse in terms of definitions, sub-definitions, clauses, sub-clauses, and why this German bloke didn't like this Greek bloke because he used one hyphen out of place three thousand years ago.

Yours, however, sticks with what I see as being the one useful and relevant point of philosophy: how do we make our lives better [or at least, not worse]?

I especially like the bit about Montaigne's farting.

Yours sincerely,

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Dear Mr R. Davies And Other People In Charge Of Torchwood:

[warning: spoiler here - highlight relevant section to read]

I note with interest last night's episode, with the recycling of [spoiler]the glove, the same damn "spooky hospital" set again, and the same "aging" effect used on Ms Agyeman as it was on Mr Tennant in last season's Who finale[/spoiler].

Are things really that bad in the Torchwood current account at Barclays that you've been forced into swingeing cutbacks and having to use everything twice?

Put it this way: I'll be really pissed off if in Episode 13 Captain Jack et al manage to save the world from a megalomaniac in a spaceship above Earth whilst Gwen sits inside a birdcage with a really crappy "reset button" ending.

Yours faithfully,

PS I also note that you've not [yet] decided to implement a Toshiko / Martha Jones GOGA subplot. Do the 10,057 postcards, telegrams and small bribes I posted to the production office really mean that little to you?

Random notes from listening to "The Moral Maze" [listenable through that link] on whether suicide can be a rational choice, and whether it is always moral to intervene.^1,2

* "The vast majority of people who have suicided have a mental illness or emotional distress" [Dr Kapur, consultant psychiatrist]. Circular statement? Certainly one which begs a mass of questions.

* "Rationality" as a term banded around. How is rationality related to empiricism – that people's reality is their perception of the world around them? Nobody has accepted that suicide seems rational to those suffering, even to those who are [normally?] connected to classic rationality.

* "If someone was going to jump off a bridge, you'd say don't do it, whoever it was; then you start making things better" [one of the panel]. Bollocks. To take an extreme case, I doubt Steve Wright would get many don't do its in Ipswich right now.

* Evidence from Catholic witness/panellist on concept of suicide as a sin [whatever that means]. I would say most potential suicides are at a point where they are beyond such considerations. Whether they should be beyond such considerations is another argument entirely.

* "Can we make a case that life is worth living?" The problem is that those most at risk are those who are closed to such messages, and even when opportunities are presented to those individuals, they are not in a state of mind to be able to access them.

* My experience, and those I have talked to, reveals a closed state of mind. ["Suicide is a closed world" says one person just as I type that.] The normal interactions which comprise society are a completely alien universe. Even the Interweb is a far-off distant place.

* The only meaningful interactions which can take place, which could make any difference, and which are "helpful" are with those with experience and empathy, and with those who bring no moral condemnation on the potential suicide:

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 foot[fetish]notes:
1 A hot topic in the UK at the moment thanks to media reporting of the [alleged] Bridgend "cluster"³, and quite a germane one for me [those of you who've read me for ages will know why].
2 Important Note: arguments in this blog which may be interpreted as being "pro-suicide" do not imply any intent on the part of the author, nor as any kind of encouragement to anybody: the author works to prevent suicide.
3 "The first 13 (male) suicides were largely unremarked upon, and "it was only when the pictures of the first pretty female suicide" that the national press furore started." [Poster on Moral Maze message board.]

soundtracktotodaysentryisprettylikedrugs

Today's thanks: Ang for the parcel and Melly for the card.

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I've mentioned before how one of the bonuses of having a partner who runs thrift stores / charity shops is that we get first pick of the donations.

A particularly tasty-looking bag turned up the other day: on top of a pile of books was one entitled "The Simpsons and Philosophy", a thick tome which, it says, uses situations and characters to introduce you to some of the main themes of Western philosophical debate, eg looking at morality by analyzing the differing approaches of Homer, Lisa and Ned Flanders, or poking about the show's political philosophy beyond left and right and what it has to say about individualism versus community, or introducing feminist critique by looking at Marge's character.

Well, I'm halfway through the book, and what I can say so far is that it's been great for insomnia.

Don't get me wrong, it's not nearly as bad as every other froggin' book ever written on philosophy [including Sophie's World, which I gave up on in case its after-effects made me illegal to drive the next day], but still it's yadda yadda yadda even to my well-trained eyes.

It's not that I think the concepts are unimportant, far from it – it's that the technical jargon of philosophy hasn't sunk into me to the point where I can read a sentence without going "hey, hang on, what does that word mean in this context again?"

Maybe that's just a question of absorbing enough "popular" philosophy to be able to digest it more easily; but I think not.

Because one of the questions I ask of philosophy and metaphysics – and one which I've not yet found any decent answer to – is: "why should 'reality' [whatever that might mean] or 'goodness' [ditto] only be describable and accessible to those who've spent years looking into it?"

That's one of the reasons my brain has turned Eastwards in this area. My brain sits much more comfortably with a notion, derived from my judicious mixture of Buddhism and Taoism¹, that these things are indescribable in mere language, and the best anyone can do is point a finger in their general direction.²

So how can one know what is or achieve a good or meaningful life? Instead of years of book studying, both Buddhism and Taoism favour a different approach; the former recommends the Eightfold Path, the latter a development of an instinctual sense of harmony and balance, both moving to a point where one has a natural appreciation of 'reality' and 'goodness' that defies accurate definition.

These approaches – which, though different, seem to me to have some very important things in common – are accessible to all; perhaps, says Taoism, even 'natural' in all of us before we get them knocked out of us by culture and education.

That's not to say that one can or should ignore education, science, philosophy, and what truths we do know about our world and everything in it. Denying such stuff makes you look like a moron.³

I think it's that they're only one, however important, bit of the picture of "how to live a decent life", in the same way that a recipe is only one bit of a decent meal.⁴

And, unless you're very weird, you don't eat the recipe.⁵

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 footfetishnotes:
1 Though it's very possible that my interpretations of them are wrong. I'm no great scholar, just an interested traveller.
2 "When the teacher points out the Way, the fool looks at the finger" [variously attributed in Taoism and Zen]
3 Also moronic is finding convenient ways not to give answers about what you think. See: most candidates in the US 2008 Presidential Race.
4 "To mystics, metaphysics is a big restaurant where you get a hundred-page menu and no food" [Robert M. Pirsig, "Lila"].
5 Frank Zappa, "The Real Frank Zappa Book" [in that context, on why a musical score is not music]

soundtracktotodaysentryisdreamworker

The major thing about being known as "hey, that long-haired weirdo's a social worker" – if you discount the cheap jokes¹ – is that people think you have a professional expertise in all sorts of delicate areas.

Take C. – 17, waitress and student in animal husbandry² – who arrived this morning unable to handle food because she'd spent the last couple of days being sick. She told me this as I grappled with the Indie crossword, and in a moment of slight insensitivity, I snapped back a one-word semi-joke: "pregnant?" She went white as a sheet. Many a truth….

A short conversation later, I sent her up the chemist's for a tester – which eventually proved negative. Much relief on her part [and also her boyfriend's, I'll bet], followed by another short conversation, on primary and secondary methods of contraception³.

Job done. Though all of that wasn't quite in the remit of mental health social work – although you could argue that the mini-panic/denial she was in was inside my remit – it goes with the image some people have of me as a glorified "agony aunt" able to dispense advice on everything from crabs to passport applications.

I don't mind that image; I'm happy to help where and with what I'm able to – so long as it's a two-way street, and I can get advice back on how to fix my heating boiler, or I can feel that I'm being consulted as a friend as well as a social worker.

Outside of work, when people ask me stuff and I get the idea that it would never be a two-way street – that they'd quickly become an emotional leech – I get out the telephone directory and tell them who to bother with their stuff instead of me. It's not that I don't want to help, but that I have to recognize my limitations – I've only so much time and energy.⁴

Please Do Note: nothing in this blog entry should be seen as a criticism of any of the people round here who I do occasionally talk about social workery things with. If I thought any of you were leeches, I'd've blocked you ages ago.

Although if any of you are thankful for any advice I've dished out, and want to reward me with photographs of yourselves naked, I certainly wouldn't say no…⁶

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footfetishnotes:
1 eg "What's the difference between a rottweiler and a social worker? It's easier to get your kids back off a rottweiler."
2 Surely in her case that's animal wifery? [*realizes he's opened a whole Pandora's Box of logical conclusion of imagery which he doesn't want in his head*]
3 There's an in-joke with Max here that is, sadly, unrepeatable on this blog; suffice to say it gives a whole new meaning to Facebook.
4 There's a whole philosophical library opening up here about the difference between pure altruism and "enlightened self-interest"; without knowing who said what or which ethicist I'm following5 I would argue that knowing one's limits is a key element of the latter – one of the things most wrong with our mental health system is how so many of the professionals in it are demoralized, burnt-out and exhausted and no good to anybody, including themselves…
5 Philosophy makes me sleepy. I'm glad that people are arguing this stuff, and are prepared to come up with new thoughts about it; just that whenever I've tried to study it, my brain rebels and won't concentrate. See "Sophie's World", which I've never been able to finish.
6 Unless you're Jordan, in which case the "no" would be shouted very loudly, alongside "ugh" and "piss off".

soundtracktotodaysentryischiquita

23. Daughter-of-Butterfly-P. watched this movie on Saturday night – I've not seen it, but apparently it's a semi-spooky thing on how this number pervades the whole of existence [or is seen to be by someone who's under a delusion of apophenia - actually quite a common thing with the people with schizophrenia I work with].

So all of Sunday whenever anything pertained to the number 23, like on a car number plate, or, say, the lemurs were in a group of two and a group of three, she'd go "Whoooo…."

This is easily explained because the way someone notices things¹ contains a natural selection bias – you only see what it is you're looking for when you start looking for it. To take a good example, I never knew how many Citroëns there were on the road until I started working for a small Citroën garage and found myself noticing whenever I passed one.²

23, I've also noticed, is the number of spam emails I receive per day, about one per hour. Having only just got back³ from an Interwebless night in nameofsmalltowndeleted and logged into my Yahoo Mail account – last time was about the same time yesterday, the message Bulk [23] came up.⁴

My other, more exclusive, Gmail account had only Spam [5] – which of course is the sum of two and three. Whooo? Bollocks.

You'll be unsurprised to learn that I am unimpressed by the so-called "discipline" of numerology, the idea that there's some sort of mystical relationship between numbers and reality or some "special" numbers that will be "lucky".

Unfortunately, this practice has been given official licence in the UK, through that good ol' scam The National Lottery. The belief in "lucky numbers" is, in my experience⁵, widespread amongst regular players [as, I believe, is low IQ, social status and disposable income⁶], and the TV coverage of draws promotes such vague beliefs.

What's that, you say? Our Government [albeit indirectly] promoting statistical stupidity? Our Government [albeit indirectly] encouraging foolish illogical thought? Any connection here to our Government also regularly releasing cod statistics that they hope nobody will have the sense to see through?

Or is that my own apophenia?

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footfetishnotes:
1 Certain practices, such as Zen, try to train one to go beyond these "programmed" ways of looking and obtain a direct view of "reality" [whatever that is]. Unfortunately I don't know any Zen masters who've seen that movie….
2 And I never knew how dangerously bad 2CVs are until I had to drive some around and weld up the total rustbuckets.
3 Grinning broadly, lightly bruised, and walking a bit funny .
4 I do check them before I delete the whole lot with one click, just in case, but in my experience YMail is more likely to generate a false negative – a spam they think is a real email – than a false positive.
5 My experience is of course an unscientific sample, but if someone would like to pay me lots of money to do the research in accordance with strict scientific method, I'd be very happy to take it on board. If anyone knows of such research, please point it out to me.
6 Possibly here I have my own selection bias – since the group of people I've observed to in order make this hunch are people being treated for long-term mental health problems, who are much more likely anyway to be at least two of these three things. See note 5.

soundtracktotodaysentryiscvalda

Cleaning Week, Day 4:

There's an autumnal feel to the day; blustery, dim and with the heating on chez Poisson for the first time since April. Not the best motivator for what is the major cleaning day of the week.

Add to that how I'm already feeling not exactly bouncy this morning; a lot of energy and vital fluids got drained out of me last night . Put it this way: it was so good, I didn't even notice until half-time that the Scotland v South Africa match had started .

Nevertheless, I shall get my pinny on, put the Zen on random play, and get moving.

99% of the limescale is gone, thanks to a mixture of Cillit Bang poisoning and duct-taping half a lemon on the end of my taps overnight [a neat little tip, so long as you don't mind the first dozen glasses of water afterwards tasting like one of those horrible wet napkins you get in little sachets with airline food], and today's main job is getting rid of the mattressful of hair that putting a vacuum cleaner anywhere near my carpet always produces.

It's coming up to three years in this little house, and I'm still blissfully happy to have got here. It may be tiny, cramped, and in the sort of rural town in which jam-making is the primary social activity, but it's [mostly] very quiet, compact and, unlike my former domicile in Ipswich, far enough out of the way that I don't have mental health patients knocking on my door every few hours. If the price of those qualities is a twice-annual whirlwind of cleaning, that seems like a fairly good deal to me.

Occasionally the future wants to creep into my thinking – what happens when the owners decide they don't want to rent it out any more? what about moving to Butterfly Town – or even Butterfly House? what about if I break my legs and can't get up my stairs that are like the North Face of the Eiger? – but never more than momentarily. I'm fairly well trained in avoiding those sorts of intellectual dead-ends: second-guessing the future is like paying your taxes six months early – it's pointless, wasteful, and nobody will thank you for it.

There is some value in investing for the future – I'm not talking a pension plan here, but in terms of effort.

Making sure my house is clean and tidy is not a requirement of the landlord's inspection – technically, they're coming to look at the structure and fixtures and fittings, not what I've done with my socks: property law gives me a right to "free enjoyment" of the house, including shoving my socks just where I like – but it's an investment in terms of keeping them sweet so that when they come to think "ooh, we've got a very saleable property here, shall we sell it or just keep taking Fish's money?" they see the value in keeping me housed and happy. And thus the investment of time and energy should pay off.

This distinction, between what I must do and what I ought to do, is of course one of the major fault lines in our society now….

…but that's a whole other blogful of entries….

[...and two very good books....]