Blue Lake

Blue Lake
Originally uploaded by imogenesis

You can find this and other photos from my Mt Gambier placement to date over on flickr :)

"The kindest Africans had not changed at all, and even after all these years the best of them are bare-assed."

I have been travelling a fair bit recently; I will spare you the details as they are pretty mundane, suffice to say that I have been in Mt Gambier for 4 weeks on a university placement and this weekend will be the first one I have actually spent in the town. In fact today was the first Friday I have spent at the hospital…

I have been reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari on aeroplanes and at airports… two sets of flights to Canberra and back was enough time for me to finish it. The book is subtitled “Overland from Cairo to Capetown”, but this is as much a book about Africa itself as it is about travelling, and about the writer re-discovering the continent where he had lived and worked 40 years before this safari.

Theroux writes in a way that I find evocative and engaging without being wordy; he makes me want to visit Africa and Egypt – which is ‘not Africa’. He keeps the distance and observer role of a journalist, but seems to have a talent for talking to people, for drawing their stories out of them. He is also not afraid to ask questions about the political situation, a thing that should be done carefully in some countries!

Overall, I would have to say that the picture Theroux paints of much of Africa is pretty bleak. It seems to be a continent of corrupt governments, dependant on foreign aid – even propped up by it. Too many people have ‘inherited’ this same dependence and feel entitled to assistance from white people with no effort on their own part. Theroux’s view of foreign aid workers and missionaries is dim; to put it a little harshly, they feed nothing but the culture of dependence and their own egos. His portrait of Robert Mugabe is almost terrifying, and his depiction of Zimbabwe at that time nothing short of tragic… in the 10 years since, little seems to have changed.

Perhaps most depressing of all is that he does not find the situation improved in the 40 years since he was a teacher in Malawi. In fact he finds it worse – the school where he once taught is falling over, the library devoid of books (they have been stolen by students) and few of his former pupils have made much of their lives. Throughout Africa he finds the same thing – Western-built infrastructure is falling apart and there is nothing to replace it. Indian immigrants have been scared away, their shops closed and no Africans have the ability/ willingness to open new businesses in their place – rows of shops in countless towns lie empty and abandoned. There are many other examples of this sort of degeneration.

Theroux’s eventual conclusion with respect to foreign aid seems to be this: for hundreds of years, Westerners have been doing more harm than good in Africa. We should get the heck out of there, and let Africans fix their own problems in their own way*. And herein lies the ray of hope. The idea that “the best of (Africans) are bare-assed” (usually literally) runs strongly throughout this book. Despite the apparent hopelessness of the situation, there are many good and kind Africans. There are those who are willing to work against the status-quo and even their own governments to improve their countries. Despite everything, he seems to see a ray of hope for Africa.

*My words, his ideas.

December Declutter

The lovely Emma over at My House Smells Like Vanilla posted a "10 things gone!" list/ challenge today, so in the unending quest to declutter my house (& indeed my life, I suppose), I've decided to take on the challenge.

Here's Em's list:

1. ten pieces of clothing
   
2. ten books
   
3. ten craft supplies
   
4. ten useless pieces of paper
   
5. ten pieces of kitchen crap
   
6. ten cosmetic/grooming supplies and
   
7. ten things from your "study / basement / laundry / shed" or wherever things go to never be seen again
   
8. ten pairs of shoes or socks
   
9. ten toys
   
10. ten things out of your bathroom
    

The challenge lasts a month; I will be starting on Monday and therefore ending on Christmas Eve.  I'll be posting my efforts, as will Em, and I'd encourage you to join us.

"Disillusion and opportunity"

This editorial popped up in UK medical journal The Lancet recently. It had some good things to say, and I think is worth a read. (But then, I think we've established that I'm interested in this issue)

I particularly like these points:

"Between 1994 and 2003, the number of children in the USA diagnosed with bipolar disorder increased 40-fold. Are we pathologising normal feelings and behaviour? Worse, our methods locate the fault (typically presumed to be neurochemical or genetic) in the child—rather than the environments that create distress and misbehaviour."

"If psychiatry is to retain its claim to rationality, it must allow patients, including children, to be heard, and not merely drugged."

Bet you can't guess why!

I found a totally fun tool today: COLOURlovers (via Design*Sponge) and have been playing around with a couple of colour palettes.

The website has this neat feature where you can point it to a picture online, and it will give you a selection of colours from that picture, which you can use to create a colour palette; plus it also gives you tools to adjust the colours and suggestions of similar colours.

My first attempt was based on this picture (also via D*S):



but, well, it sucked. The blue was too bright & clashed with the pink, which was also too bright...you get the idea. It eventually morphed into this, which is better:



but I'm still not sure about the pink, and it was a struggle just getting it to this. I was having serious issues getting the red right, too.

Anyway, then I plugged in this gorgeous picture:

(UK Vogue July 2008, courtesy m.writes

and got this:


which took about 5 seconds to come together! I swapped out the green for this softer one, but otherwise I think all the colours are ones the website pulled out of the photo. I was surprised that it didn't pick up any of the blues from the girl's dress. The result is quite nice anyway, no?

Anyway, that was my exercise in procrastination for the day :)

Research, drug companies, and income reporting...

Has anyone else seen this article* about some eminent US child psychiatrists failing to fully report income from drug companies?

"A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators."

It's not clear at this stage whether Dr Biederman and his colleagues' research has actually been compromised, but given the subjective nature of psychiatry in general, this is very concerning - especially given that this involves treatment of children with powerful psychiatric medications. Many children all over the world have been prescribed medications because of these doctors' work, and now we find there is a possibility that the research on which these decisions were based was invalid, or that the conclusions were invalid. Critics certainly believe this may be the case:

"The group published the results of a string of drug trials from 2001 to 2006, but the studies were so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive, experts say. In some studies testing antipsychotic drugs, the group defined improvement as a decline of 30 percent or more on a scale called the Young Mania Rating Scale — well below the 50 percent change that most researchers now use as the standard.

Controlling for bias is especially important in such work, given that the scale is subjective, and raters often depend on reports from parents and children, several top psychiatrists said."

I'll be clear here - in general, I am pro-psychiatry. I think the work they do is vitally important, and that it can genuinely improve people's lives. But I also think that medicine generally, and psychiatry in particular, has come to rely too heavily on pharmaceuticals, and often fails to see people as whole people. Oftentimes we need to think harder about the implications of our treatments, and how we deal with the adverse effects/side effects.  This story also highlights some issues about the relationships between doctors (and medical students) and drug companies.

At best, this is a blow for the credibility of psychiatry, and especially child psychiatry, a speciality that has already faced a lot of controversy and can ill-afford this kind of bad press. At worst, it brings the validity of much of the field into question. It certainly highlights inadequacies in the reporting of researchers' income and checking in the accuracy of this reporting.

*props to the education rep who posted this on the student discussion board, & for getting on his own soap box about the matter.

Is this art, or just a by-product of construction?

What do we think?

(I actually wish I'd taken a photo of this building when I first saw it like this - I think there were more)