Tag Archives: mental health

A good start

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Mike Adams wants to eliminate from the univerisity all majors ending in the term “studies”. He is a brave man. However, he does not go far enough.

In the past, I’ve gotten myself in hot water for suggesting that the African American Center, LGBTQIA Center, Women’s Center, and El Centro Hispano be shut down in order to ease our current state budget crisis. But, today, I propose that we go further by eliminating all academic majors and minors ending with the word “studies.”

This is not meant to be prejudicial – although, having little else to do, the Arrogant American Centers will try to make it so. Let it be known that I propose eliminating more than just Arrogant American and Hyphenated American Studies. I also want to do away with Communication Studies, Environmental Studies, Liberal Studies, Women’s Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. And I want the cuts to be implemented across our sixteen-campus system.

via Rigor Please – Page 1 – Mike Adams – Townhall Conservative.

We also need to eliminate all boutique commissions and departments. The Ministry for Women, the Arts, Maori Affairs (Te Puni Kokari), Disabilities. The Mental Health Commission. The Families Commission. The Human Rights Commission. For it is not the role of the government to have its own advocacy services, or to produce a series of star chambers or to tell me what to think, or how to act.

The government is to keep the peace, honour the Queen, and preserve the Nation. So… Roger does not go far enough. We need to remove those unaccountable quasi bureaucracies that insist that the hyphenated issues take precedence over the common good.

Madness and childbirth.

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Madness is a complication of childbirth. This graph is from a Scandinavian Paper about first time mothers. One can easily see that there is quite a high rate in the first few months. This rapidly decreases towards the usual incidence of madness, which is about one person per 1000 a year in the young.

For women, childbirth, not having children, is a risk period. But there are risks for this.

If you allow for previous psychiatric illness — the big hazard ratio is not being with your partner at the time of birth.

I’d speculate this reflects the common sense of most traditional societies; women with small babies need their family and relatives around to support them through the first few weeks.

Back… and is mental health a viable topic at all?

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Sin ce the last post I have been travelling, there has been an election in New Zealand (and the USA) and I have been trying to get things sorted out after some time away.

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.