But… there are standards. I support the Whale in exposing rorts of credit cards for private meals, flowers, underpants and other things.

Like McCrystal, I have been at times scathing about my employers. I have had confrontations with the suits. I have advocated for staff. That is part of my job. However, if a reporter was present… I would turn into a jargon spouting eunuch. It’s called survival.

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances…

In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important. These days, the inner soap opera is the most discussed and the most fraught arena of political life.

And into this world walks Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

via Op-Ed Columnist – General McChrystal and the Culture of Exposure – NYTimes.com.

It may be that McCrystal has more honour that I, or any other Kiwi, has.

Blogging is lower down the priority list.

Most recent thoughts though:

Most of the data on Mental Health Promotion I can find is of the”Oh this is lovely and we are so nice because we do it”. The other set of data I can find relates to studies. This is less optimistic. A recent meta analysis shows benefits to mental and physical health from exercise and health interventiosn but not psychological interventions  [1]. A second review suggests that the data on MH promotion is too sketchy to produce any reliable costings of benefits [2].

I get irritated when the policy is “do something” when the data indicating that it may make a difference is not there. I would support people doing trials to see if interventions can make a difference — but claiming that we can promote mental health when it looks like efforts to do so could not be effective is at least intellectually dishonest, if not actively harmful

1.  Kuoppala J, Lamminpää A, Husman P. Work health promotion, job well-being, and sickness absences-a systematic review and meta-analysis.J Occup Environ Med. 2008 Nov;50(11):1216-27

2.  Zechmeister I, Kilian R, McDaid D; MHEEN group. Is it worth investing in mental health promotion and prevention of mental illness? A systematic review of the evidence from economic evaluations.BMC Public Health. 2008 Jan 22;8:20.