Medcast news and blog
Do as I say, not what I do!
In the country town where I grew up there was a GP who got very drunk at the golf club on a regular basis. His antics were a source of community amusement, and he had a lot of patients with similar alcohol misuse problems – mostly because he never talked to them about their drinking habits.
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Men and women are different from each other. What a profound statement that is! Also one that could get me into a lot of trouble, particularly if it led to a discussion about whether that difference was genetically or culturally determined. I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m thinking about depression and suicide and the ways in which men and women express their distress differently.
Are you having difficulty getting your head around the use of technology in mental health care? The idea that computer programs might interact with humans in a humanlike way has been around for decades but ideas about implementation are getting more and more sophisticated.
I was called in by my Head of Learning and Teaching to discuss my ‘workload’ recently. My first thought was “oh no, they will add more to my workload as they’ve discovered that I’ve been working under my contracted hours”.
A friend of mine came to have coffee with me recently. She was very anxious and upset about her husband’s upcoming prostatectomy. He had developed a fairly aggressive cancer that needed immediate action.
Our professional identities play out in tangible ways such as our language, clothes and everyday behaviour. Our identity is the external representation of our inner feelings, beliefs, experiences and values. We all have a number of identities which reflect our day to day experiences and the environments within which we operate.
Have you ever spoken to someone and thought “OMG! I would be depressed too if I were in their shoes”? Of course you have! But have you ever met someone who despite all the bad luck and set backs has remained optimistic and been able to make the best out of what would be for others an impossible and unbearable situation?
So much medical focus is on the deficits in people that those of us who work within the medical model tend to forget to look for people’s strengths. We may eventually even fail to see and value our own strengths as they become, in our own minds, just things that everybody has.
We could all do with a little improvement in our “mental fitness.” It would help us manage those moments of anxiety and low mood, but it would also help us manage the ordinary stresses in our daily lives.
There’s no question about it -if you don’t feel so well, if you are feeling stressed and anxious, smoking a cigarette will make you feel better for a while. Many a soldier for whom cigarettes were supplied as part of their daily rations, will tell you so.