Home // Posts tagged "politics"

Breivik – Insanity and Doublethink

This tragedy in Norway has left me echoing Peter Rabbit: how do they do it? What can it be? There’s idiocy in everyone but twice as much in them (rhyming never was my strongest suit).

Crazydelusionalinsanelooneymadman!!!!11!11!eleven!

It was bad enough when people (even PZ Myers, who ought to know better, being a level 20 sceptic with a +10 amulet of rationality) pronounced Breivik “delusional and insane” and a “lunatic” – without any good evidence that is the case. It is both a symptom and cause of the stigma and discrimination the psychiatrically ill face every day, that whenever someone does something appalling that (by its appalling nature) is beyond the comprehension of the rest of us, people start saying “he must be crazy” and variations.

Now, while I am not saying he is definitely not psychiatrically ill, I am saying there is nothing so far evident in his actions or his “manifesto” that really indicates him to be so. He might yet turn out to be psychotic, but at this point we have no evidence to say so.

Particularly, there is no apparent formal thought disorder in what I’ve read of his manifesto. Thought disorder is generally more apparent in writing than speech, and given that English is apparently his second language, any thought disorder ought to be screamingly apparent in his written English. So I think we can say he’s probably not thought disordered.

Is he deluded? Nothing in what he’s written indicates clearly that to be the case. They’re awful ideas, yes, but seriously, if they – by their content, which is all we have to go on – are delusions, then the US Tea Party are all deluded …

… ‘k … Moving on …

Is he hallucinated? I’ve seen no mention of anything to suggest so. No communication from God or Satan or anyone else for example, which you might expect if this were psychotically-driven.

Is he insane? That’s perhaps easier to make an armchair comment on. Most definitions of insanity (a legal term, not a psychiatric one any more) are based on the McNaughton rules, which basically require that the person, to be found insane, be unable – through mental illness, sometimes mental retardation – to understand the nature or moral wrongfulness of their actions. It appears pretty clear that Breivik knew exactly the nature of his actions. Moral wrongfulness? Ok, that’s arguable, but unless his moral compass is askew because of psychosis, it doesn’t make him legally insane; a psychopathic nationalistic hate-filled horror yes … but not insane.

Just a psychopathic nationalistic hate-filled horror.

DOUBLETHINK

Anyway … Then we get the doublethink starting, and while the “crazy” talk bugs me deeply on a professional level, it’s this doublethink that really boggles my mind. I mean really, how do these people walk without falling down?

A good piece in Salon captures a lot of the idiocy. Even though Breivik explicitly espoused the nationalistic, racist, white-supremacist, anti-Islam sentiments of the far right, they have divined, using their amazing powers of divination, that in fact the “problems” that created him and caused this tragedy were… wait for it … Multiculturalism and Islam and such. Even abortion, would you believe?

And people are saying Breivik’s insane?

George Orwell invented a term for this amazing capacity to believe totally contradictory things (such as Glenn Beck saying that a youth politics camp “sounds a little like the Hitler Youth” – despite running a political youth camp himself: DOUBLETHINK – and that’s exactly what these rightwing whackos are displaying: super-Orwellian degrees of doublethink.

Scary as hell. Orwell had it sussed, ladies and germs. This is, indeed, the world of 1984.

Update: Andrew Bolt has actually managed to cram in both of these positions in one post for the Herald-Sun. Wow.

Mental Health Budget FAIL

13 May, 2013 Raphael Fraser Reply

A Swing … and a Miss

I’m disappointed. I’m not surprised, but I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed that in a “mental health package” of 2.2 billion over five years, there is almost nothing aimed at those most in need. In fact I’ll go further: there is absolutely nothing aimed at those most in need, and I’m more than disappointed; while I am remaining calm (because of the lack of surprise, primarily), my feelings about this are pretty much unprintable.

So I’d better stick with my thoughts.

The main thought is quite simple: this will not help. This will not help the most severely ill. This will not help those who do not fall within a particular age band. Thus will not help those who do not have a particular type of disorder.

The bulk of the money (at least of that going into actual clinical service) as I understand is earmarked for the creation of more Headspace, and Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centres (EPPIC). As I have remarked on previously, these services serve only a narrow age band, and the majority of the psychiatrically ill thereby miss out on any increase in resources. Headspace is expressly not set up to treat serious psychiatric illness, so even young people will not be helped by that money if they have a serious illness. EPPIC are aimed, as the name suggests, at psychotic disorders. So young people with a serious but non-psychotic psychiatric illness will not be helped by this extra money.

An abiding characteristic of boutique services like Headspace, and (I admit this is an assumption) EPPIC, is that they are not geared up to treat really acute illness. If someone requires daily input, if they have strong thoughts of suicide or harm to themselves – or others – they will be referred to the acute service of the general mental health service.

People like me.

Working in teams that are chronically under-funded and under-resourced.

Teams that see people of any age, with any disorder, when they are most severely and acutely ill.

Teams that don’t have the luxury of saying no on the basis of age, lack of psychosis – or simply being too sick or too “risky”.

Teams that will see not a red cent from this budget.

Professor Alan Rosen from the Brain Mind Research Institute at Sydney University has written criticising the allocation of this extra funding. He has made similar points, but more gently, and without calling anyone an idiot. So I shall do that:

This. Is. Complete. Idiocy.

There was mention of not putting more money into old systems – that are not working. Fair enough on the face of it. However, allow me to illustrate some of what I face every day. I work in one of the largest and fastest-growing Local Government Areas in the country. It has large amounts of poverty, of alcohol and other drug abuse, and of disability – both medical and psychiatric. Our outpatient psychiatric services however, at half the national average, receive the lowest level of resources, in terms both of dollars and staffing, in the country. If you do that to a service, I can guarantee that no matter your model of service, it will not function well.

We are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. And indeed we are the ambulance, despite a huge throng of people milling around at the top and falling off. So unsurprisingly we don’t do as well as we need to. These services like Headspace and EPPIC will contend they are like a fence at the top of the cliff; build a proper fence and you won’t need more ambulances.

Admirable, but bollocks. Actually they just pick out a few of the people farthest away from the cliff and make them a really swish fence – but if they start to get too close to the cliff’s edge, will just tell them to be sure to look for the ambulance at the bottom.

Maybe they’ll call to give the ambulance a heads-up, but that’s about it.

Now I realize that people far more eminent than I (Professor Ian Hickie and Professor Patrick McGorry) have spoken lovingly about this budget and the wondrous things it will do for mental health care in this country. Well … they would, wouldn’t they? Headspace is Prof Hickie’s baby, and EPPIC Prof McGorry’s. Colour me cynical, but I don’t think that’s coincidental.

Severe and Debilitating

Ok, there’s something in the budget for those with severe and debilitating illness. Not acute care though. Look, I don’t take issue with enhancing the recovery care we provide. In fact that’s the whole damn point, but the first step in recovery for many is acute treatment of terrible illness. If you don’t do that right, the rest is most unlikely to succeed; at best it will provide less benefit than it could have.

The stuff about “increasing economic and social participation for people with mental illness” is the same: excellent and necessary, but needs to be able to build on the results of good acute care of serious psychiatric illness. That acute care is under-resources and poorly structured, and this budget will do nothing to change that.

I agree that simply pouring money in is unlikely to give great results. I also agree with Professor Rosen when he notes that:

“… provision of well tested 7 day and night mobile mental health teams, with adaptations for regional populations, has not yet been tried consistently and equitably across this country. One state, Victoria, is an exception, and even the resourcing there is now fraying.

These teams only don’t work where they have never been tried. Or when their resources are withdrawn due to managerial expediency or loss of a clinically informed culture. However, there is little encouragement for public mental health services in this budget, except a pious hope that at the next CoAG meeting, the Commonwealth will be able to convince the states to match this investment.”

The evidence is there, for Assertive Community Treatment teams, for acute care home-based treatment teams, for models of care that would make a very real difference to the lives of those with severe psychiatric illness. This budget commitment is idiotic and superficial, and will do damn-all for the people who really needed more.

Disappointed. Frustrated. Angry.

And really sad.

Orwellian Newspeak: “DV”

18 April, 2013 Raphael Fraser 1 comment

I walked past a sign this morning outside the train station on my way to work. It’s a sign I’ve walked past quite a few times without noticing it terribly much. This morning I did notice it, and having been reading George Orwell’s 1984 just five minutes earlier, was rather taken by its Newspeak-ness. It reads: “This community does not tolerate domestic violence” – which is of course commendable – and underneath is a phone number for the “DV Hotline”.

On the face of it this seems fine: we shouldn’t tolerate domestic violence, and there should be an easy way for anyone suffering it to get help and support.

However…

Along with the sign, I noticed this morning how terribly Newspeak-ish is the phrase “Domestic Violence” – and worse yet: “DV”. No longer do we talk about assault, emotional cruelty, even rape (within a relationship) or suchlike; it has become “DV in the relationship”.

Words are important. They are the primary means by which we convey not just information, but the very concepts therein. In Orwell’s 1984, the Party use Newspeak to control not just information, but the public’s conception of existence. If there is no way to describe a concept, what happens to that concept. The notion Orwell puts forth through the Party is that without language to express a concept the concept can cease to exist:

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

Compare and contrast “DV in the relationship” with “He bashes his wife”. Not only is the latter more accurate and informationally complete, it is more visceral. Upon hearing or reading it there is more empathy evoked; you feel more what is happening. The Newspeak “Domestic Violence” (and especially the short, punchy, and oh-so-catchy “DV”) robs information and emotion from the concept. In fact it changes the concept: in Newspeak (“DV in the relationship”), it is the relationship that appears to be in some odd and undefinable way, at fault; in Oldspeak (“He bashes his wife”) it is clear who is at fault: a violent man.

The more I read 1984, the more I see of it in the world around me. If you have not read it, or haven’t read it for a while, read it.

Read. It. Now.

OK Gillard, Now What?

8 September, 2013 Raphael Fraser 2 comments

Right. So. Australia does finally have a new government. Of sorts. Congratulations to Julia Gillard and the Labor party – and biggest congratulations to the Greens, with 9 seats in the Senate, Yeah baby!

However…

That was frakkin’ ridiculous. Gillard, Labor, you need to sort your shit out. Srsly. We came thiiiiis close || to becoming a theocracy with Tony Abbott channelling George bloody Pell. That shouldn’t have happened, and I don’t think it needed to. I present humbly (or perhaps not so humbly) my recommendations to your government:

Ditch Conroy’s filter.

It’s an odious, loathsome idea, condemned by every rational person outside China, Saudi Arabia etc. And quite apart from that it Will. Not. Work. Just add a ? to the end of the url and you’ll be able to go to any website on the list. That gets blocked? Add another character. FFS. And there are half a dozen other easy and quick ways around it. The list will leak, and be a great directory of suggested dodgy sites for anyone who wants to know. And finally, most of the really bad stuff isn’t on the web. The World Wide Web does not equal the Internet, and most of the bad stuff (so I hear from people who know more about this than I) is circulated via all those back alleys of the Internet, rather than the glossy shop fronts of the WWW.

So chuck it. It was a major point of difference between you and the Coalition, and one that was clearly in their favour.

Stop being dicks about marriage.

Let people get married to the people they love. SRSLY. It doesn’t matter if they’re straight, gay, bi, male, female, transgender, what-bloody-ever. Just stop being dicks. Stop pandering to loud conservative idiot pressure groups. I’m about 80% sure I read recently that most of Australia really doesn’t have a problem with the idea of gay marriage. It’s just loud noisome twits like George Pell and Jim Wallace et al.

For who do you work? The religious right, or the majority of the people of Australia?

Meaningful action on pollution

Australia is right up there with the worst per capita CO2 emitters in the world. Some hard action is going to be needed – the coal industry’s unhappiness notwithstanding. It is not an issue that can be sensibly ignored, nor is it rational to withold action until we can say with 100% certainty that it is all anthropogenic. By then it is likely to be too late. Sure, Australia can’t fix the whole world, but that’s not a reason to let your own backyard go to shit. Nor is other countries’ reluctance to act justification for inaction.

Stop unfairly privileging religion.

What is it? Twenty-two million dollars MOAR for school chaplaincy? Untrained, ideologically-based, exclusionary … Simply, efforts at indoctrination. What about more school counsellors? More training and support for school counsellors.

And Special Religious Education. Bloody hell. School time made available for religious instruction? That should be down to parents. End of story. And if you don’t want to do the religious stuff you can’t have actual teaching and learning happen? Ethics. Ethics classes would address in reality what SRE is ostensibly there for – and at which it is demonstrably failing: just look around you. Look at what the SRE “teachers” are teaching. As we’ve seen up in Queensland, they can be shoving young earth creationism down our kids’ throats. SRE is about indoctrinating children into christianity, pure and simple. That has no place in schools.

Aren’t we all supposed to be equal?

And on that note, how is it that by calling your organisation a religion, you can avoid paying taxes and rates? That’s just wrong – at a very basic level. They argue that they do good charitable work. Fine. Set up your charity, open the books, and be not-for-profit and tax-exempt. The church itself is not a charity; being a church does not equal doing charitable work. If a church has a charity, that charity can fairly be tax-exempt, but not the church itself. That’s simply unjust. The same argument applies against their exemption from paying rates.

To Stay in Government:

In all seriousness, Prime Minister Gillard, the closeness of this election should serve as ample demonstration you and your party need to take a good hard look at what you are doing. The above are a few things which honestly are simple, sensible, and just; they would differentiate your party from the Coalition (such differentiation being sadly lacking at the moment), and I think (for what my opinion is worth) they would increase your chances of remaining in government 3 years hence.

Twitter’s Virtual Coffeehouses and the Re-Enlightenment

25 August, 2013 Raphael Fraser Reply

In a recent blog post, Atheist Climber wrote about an “Atheist Re-Enlightenment”. I thought it was an interesting notion, and he accompanied it by tweeting a link to the Wikipedia page on the Enlightenment.

In the Atheist Climber article there is a discussion of the need for a re-enlightenment – and I certainly agree. What struck me though, was something only touched on there, but that really stood out in the Wiki article on the Enlightenment.

Now first: I’m an uncultured sod, innit? I knew almost nothing about the Enlightenment – and so was very grateful for the link and the prompt to read about it. The thing that struck me was that is wasn’t simply that lots of cool stuff was discovered or done, but that there was a shift towards being inclusive of the public, and widening both the availability of knowledge, and the discussion – of knowledge, of science, of politics, of philosophy …. Coffeehouses sprang up, and became places where the public would meet and discuss these things.

Really I think that’s what we need: inclusion. Getting more and more people discussing all of this. As Atheist Climber noted, the internet can facilitate this; he mentioned atheists and sceptics popping up on his facebook page and so on. I must say that despite having intelligent and thoughtful facebook friends, discussions on serious issues don’t seem to do much more than get ‘liked’. Twitter on the other hand is full of these sorts of discussions. All the time. Everywhere across the world. It’s like a vast network of “virtual coffeehouses” through which I think and hope a Re-Enlightenment really could spread.

So … anyone reading this who isn’t on Twitter: what the hell are you waiting for? Turn on, sign up and join in. I’ll make it easy to start: I’ve created a list called Coffeehouse, which comprises those tweeps with whom I tend to have those sorts of conversations. Follow that list, and join in the conversations. You might learn something (I certainly do) and you might impart some knowledge (I hope I do). – And then spread the word further; the more, the enlighteneder.

Body in Mind