Voicing Opinions

When a political party is elected into power to govern many millions of people, it is recognised that the audience is split into two broad categories :

1. The general public
2. Businesses

Whilst the former work for the latter, the distinction is pretty clear-cut, defining two very different types of audience.

The general public are significantly larger in number, but they are diffused in comparison to businesses, especially large corporations.

Big business act in a unified way that has no parallel with the public – the only significant non-political voices acting on behalf of the people are trade unions. These are narrowly defined organisations that cover only a small subset of the public and their needs.

As well as focus and representation (of the interests of the corporation as a collective), the corporate voice has penetration via lobbying and party donations.

Politicians are swamped with business influence and only hear pockets of concern from the public and unions. It is human nature to respond to the loudest voices. So it is no wonder that government tends to side with business needs ahead of public needs.

In light of this fundamental bias, the public need to have a focused representation that can match the business voice. I would advocate that these features of a true democracy would start to give people voice to effect a rebalancing of political influence :

1. Active, non-political representatives in each town and city that regularly feed local and national concerns to government.

2. More referendums to enable collective decision making on key matters, such as the privatisation of the NHS and Education. These could be instigated by point 1 via sufficient national consensus.

It has always puzzled me why the standard wait for certain NHS treatments seemed pretty invariant over time. That a major operation would entail something like an 18 month wait, for example.

So I thought it prudent to look at the logistics of waiting lists.

I will describe 3 waiting lists, with an NHS one as the last.

1. Waiting list to get a season ticket for Liverpool FC

The wait is normally a few years as hundreds of applicants on the existing list are served by a yearly trickle of un-renewed season tickets each season. The trickle may expand or dry up in accordance with the success of the team. Unless non-season-ticket seats are made available for new season ticket releases, or prices are raised, there is not much that can be done to reduce the wait.

2. Waiting list for a bespoke cabinet to be made be a master cabinet maker

Here there is a single conduit for the product. If he completes one cabinet a week and has a waiting list of ten customers, then new customers will have a ten week minimum wait. This ten week wait will be static if one new customer rate arrives each week (lets exclude holidays and sickness to keep things simple). If the cabinets become popular, the rate will exceed this and a backlog will build up so that new customers have to wait 12, 15, 20 or so weeks as the months pass. If he employs extra staff or demand lowers, the backlog can be cleared to give a shorter waiting list time.

3. Waiting list to have an MRI scan for an injured limb

I had one of these in November 2012. I was told that the wait was about 3 or 4 months and I duly received my appointment after 3.5 months wait.

They deal with around 10 patients a day (I cannot remember the exact numbers). Like the cabinet maker, it is a single conduit – a single resource that must be scheduled. They might increase the number of slots in a day, or buy an additional scanner to decrease waiting times.

But if the wait is a pretty regular 3 or 4 months, then supply matches demand.

A question that comes to mind here and with the cabinet maker is how a backlog – a queue – was established in the first place. With 10 patients a day, that would represent about 130 patients on the waiting list.

But lets suppose that this backlog was whittled back to a much smaller number by temporarily increasing the number of slots available for patients. We could then get to a position where the wait would be a much more acceptable 1 month.

If all things were equal, would it eventually slip back to 3 to 4 months? Only if the demand rose above the supply. If the demand actually dropped below the supply capability, then the wait would drop below 1 month.

But the point is that a one-off exercise is all that is needed to rectify an ongoing problem where everyone waits 3 to 4 months unnecessarily (or much longer in terms of operations).

Unless, that is, the waiting time is contrived.

In the case of surgery, with 12, 18 and 24 month waits, this would serve to lose some patients who actually died before their slot was available. But it also makes many choose private treatment instead.

In summary, if the wait for a resource is long and at a stable level, then it can be reduced – but there may not be the will to do that. There may be ulterior motives to retain an artificially long wait.

The Eastern concept of mindfulness is pretty straight forward, so needn’t be seen in an esoteric light. It simply requires you to be wary of yourself and how you relate to the world. In a nutshell, it asks that you pause before ‘doing’ so as to give yourself time to reflect and observe, and sometimes change tack.

I find it fun trying to be mindful, but it is not all pluses. You do learn to frequently nip temper in the bud by re-framing it in that moment of pause, diluting its potency. And a life with less unnecessary anger is generally a happier, more sociable one.

But there is also a slightly negative side. You start to see a disconnect between your conscious mind – the reflective state in the pause – and the subconscious mind plus body communicating its needs and desires. And because you start to notice, without judgement, your sub-conscious intents before you might act on them, you get to see some nasty ways you have. Ways that have served your ancestors well, such as the urge to take umbrage when someone corrects you, but which often do not serve you well. Gradually, you start seeing the ego manifest – often childishly defending your position in the light of contrary information.

Without the pause to reflect, you are often propelled into action, and become embroiled with something that only hindsight might then see you regret.

The point about mindfulness is not to entertain some fancy Eastern high-falutin concept, but to make your life smoother and happier. It is useful for the simple matter that subconscious and bodily communications fail to come with value labels. We may have an urge to do something for reasons that our conscious mind would deem invalid. We may get irritable because the body is not well rested and keeps complaining to us, urging, for some strange reason, to get grumpy, as if that would correct the bodily problems. Ignoring the urge to irritability works – the urge does pass and you relax, accepting the bodily complain as something to be contended with rather than complained about.

But on this matter of mindfulness, it occurred to me only this afternoon in conversation with a student that such conversations are not two way. I, or at least the conscious part of me, was enjoying the chat, but it was caught between the words from the companion, and the messages from my subconscious and my body. The thrust of such multiple dialogues is a very tangible one, as I often get caught listening to someone speak at length while, at the same time, my mind is desperate to interrupt with my viewpoint on the matter. Without mindfulness, we might suppress or concede to this desperation, but develop no real consistent improvement. Being wary of it, we can strike a balance between the two. Maybe – I am still learning this art as my subconscious is very insistent.

And there is another facet of mindfulness – that such urgent subconscious requests are not direct caused by our conscious mind. They come from me, but not from the part of me engaged in the conversation. So I cannot blame my conscious mind – what I see as ‘me’ – for such genetically determined habits. So I fuss less about this as a ‘weakness’. That is relaxing. But it does not stop me taking responsibility for modifying this habit – to try to work around its anti-social nature.

I am an over-reactive type of human. I did not choose to be – this is simply my genetic inheritance. So I cannot blame myself – nor can others blame me for that.

However, genetics is not a mandate, but a kind of framework. And both environment and your own choice of behaviour can override many aspects of genetic predisposition. So the over-reactive type cannot fully abdicate responsibility for their overreactions.

The excellent book ‘Quiet” by Susan Cain discusses introversion, a personality type that is often the result of an over-reactive nature. It might appear to be a paradox that the noisy baby lying by the side of the quiet baby is likely to become the introvert, and the quiet baby the extrovert. But if the noise is the result of an emotional reaction to sensory overload, then it makes sense that a baby might grow up to seek refuge in the quiet of a book. Conversely, that the quiet baby, calm in the face of the same stimulation as the noisy baby might grow up to sensation seeking to get his kicks.

Resulting habits – such as the desire to read and live in your mind – may be consequences of sensory overload avoidance rather than consequences of a genetic inclination to an academic lifestyle.

The over-reactive nature is essentially a result of an over-reactive amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain, in effect. It is found in the more primitive part of the brain, receiving sensory signals before the conscious mind does. This permits the potentially life-saving fast fight or flight response before we are even aware of what has happened.

But an overly-sensitive amygdala can make for a harder time as the emotional response to life is essentially amplified. Unless they have a good upbringing, over-reactive types are more likely to get stressed and/or suffer depression. They are also more likely to be empathic – to feel what others feel – as long, that is, they are not exhausted from overload!

However, Cain revealed something very interesting about over-reactive types in her book – that a nurturing, loving upbringing will make a reactive-type more healthy than a low-reactive type. Less likely to get depressed for example. A sensitive nature, accepted and nurtured by parents will allow a reactive-type to flourish. Conversely, a harsh upbringing will mean a much harder life for an over-reactive type than their tougher skinned brethren.

It all makes sense of course, in hindsight – a sensitive microphone can excel in capturing delicate sounds (nuances) but will distort (overreact) with loud sounds. A robust microphone is a good, all purpose device, but will miss out on subtle (and often exquisite) sounds.

I mentioned that I was an over-reactive type because I wanted to relate some personal discoveries on the matter.

At one period in my life, I had bouts of acute anxiety that are termed panic-attacks. You literally feel like you are about to die, or at least have a heart attack. It is, in essence, an extreme emotional reaction to a potential threat, real or perceived (it can even simply be a situation that looks like one that was a danger in the past). The brilliant “Self help for nerves” by Claire Weekes allowed me to manage my way out of this caustic anxiety spiral.

The essence of her method is counter-intuitive to a large degree. You must not try to push away or ignore the intensely horrible feelings of a panic attack (such as pounding heart and light headedness). You must use the Eastern Philosophical concept of acceptance to just see it as it really is without judgement. Trying to push it away or worrying about what is happening will inflame and hence aggravate the attack. Accepting it will allow it to slowly fade away.

It would seem that the mindfulness is a key part to retraining your amygdala. By observing without judgement, you are quietly telling the amygdala that this is not a big problem – you provide a calming effect as well as a cue that the situation in the future is not one that is to be so concerned about. But you must be patient.

Most Christmas days, I have to endure the mother of all bad headaches, caused by a catch-22 situation where my subconscious thinks back to previous years where it got overloaded and tenses up in preparation for a possible repeat. This year, I was able to ignore the tension headache that awoke me at 4am and eventually go back to sleep in a relaxed state. It has taken years to develop this capacity to relax on demand, and it does not always work, but this time I ventured from my normally solitary life-style to a day with my sister and her family.

But relaxed or not, I felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable sat there watching all the presents being unwrapped. It was a reaction, in part, to losing the quiet of my own company. But it was way over the top. I knew this, but that knowledge cannot directly get through to the inflamed amygdala to calm it down. It screamed at me to run away or to tell people to be quieter or behave differently. I felt so uncomfortable that my mind desperately wanted the discomfort to end. What is deeply frustrating to over-reactive types about this situation is that their mind that is creating the discomforting feelings in the first place.

This was not a panic attack, but I decided to apply the same techniques. I observed what was happening in the room – people actually having fun and getting excited – and observed my deep agitation – and did what Weekes advises – just let time pass.

It was a very interesting experience. I suspect I helped accelerate the process because I knew that the discomfort would indeed fade, and that I reflected on the disparity between feeling and the innocence of the scene causing the feeling. It was like being patient with an impatient child nagging at you – sooner or later then would give up, as long as you did not react.

I reckon it was about an hour before the discomfort faded away. Remember that this discomfort is not one of my choosing – I was literally sitting there receiving the feelings, at odds to how my conscious mind wanted to proceed.

But I believe that similar situations where I suffer acute discomfort can benefit from this mindfulness approach. Except, maybe the headache I get when in conversation with certain people – people who do not seem to sense how I feel. ‘Unempathic’ is probably the best way to describe such people. I cannot observe in a detached manner as I am part of what is being observed – the dialogue. I will have to work a way around that type of problem.

On the plus side, my highly reactive nature lets me enjoy many simple things in life with an exquisite intensity that I suspect that extroverts can only experience in highly charged situations, much less common parts of daily life. So if I can defuse and reframe my negative reactions to life and revel in the positive things, then life will be sweet!

It is tremendous that the nature of Jimmy Saville’s misdemeanours should open the door to many more exposures of child abuse that lay suppressed through fear until now. But there is, however, widespread misunderstanding when predators like Saville are labelled as paedophiles.

What is happening is that the term paedophile is being conflated with the term child-molester. So much so that some readers may still see these as one and the same thing.

But to describe paedophiles as child molesters by default is akin to describing heterosexuals as rapists by default. The forceful imposition of your sexual preference is a separate matter from that preference. A heterosexual who rapes is one who expresses his sexual preference forcefully on another. So it is that a child molester forcefully expresses his sexual attraction to children on a child.

The difficulty is that there is no normal, socially acceptable way for a paedophile to express his sexual preference for children. A healthy heterosexual man may express his attraction to a woman by courting her, walking with her, maybe holding hands. But these are inappropriate for a paedophile, even if this represents the entire extent of the expression that the paedophile wants to exercise of his instinctive attraction to children.

The assumption, reinforced repeatedly by the media, is that paedophiles are all child molesters, incapable of holding back on their lustful, debased urges. This assumption defines paedophiles as necessarily callous, selfish and brutal towards children.

But it is misguided.

Just as a person with homosexual tendencies may stay forever in the closet, hiding his or her sexual preference, paedophiles can also submerge their sexual preference, ashamed that they are socially abnormal in this regard. Or their preference for children may manifest in infatuation, with the target of their adoration as sacred as the target of heterosexual infatuation to the point that abusing the target would be totally at odds to their feelings.

The point I repeat is that a sexual preference does not mandate it’s expression, and that the preference in reality is rarely forced, by heterosexual, homosexual or paedophile.

For the media and the general public, the concept of sexual attraction for children is a blinding label in matters like Jimmy Saville. In a very real sense, that attraction is actually a minor matter. It is the callous expression of that attraction that is the devil in his case and that of many others. They act like psychopaths, devoid of conscience, often carrying out their carnal acts with total disregard for the effect both then and later on the child, and the family of that child.

To focus on sexual preference is looking in the wrong direction. The focus should be on the psychopathic nature of their behaviour, where the term child-molester is a better label. Focusing on the source of desire rather than its expression is akin to describing an armed robber who kills a shop-keeper in pursuit of the till contents as a lover-of-money. He may be, but he is certainly much more a dangerous man who disregards the value of lives around him enough to kill in his expression of his love of money.

One of the features of many middle aged and old people that bores young people senseless is their ill health complaints. It does get terribly predictable and dull to hear about recurring aches and pains, pushing to one side more interesting things that could be discussed. So I am in great danger of boring you with talk of my headaches. So I hope to make it interesting enough to keep your attention.

Imagine if you had been badly bitten by a dog, and are trying to overcome the fear each time you see a dog. What you will notice is that the fear reaction has kicked in before you are fully aware of it. It is then engaged and entrenched – your thoughts more likely to inflame it than passify it.

My 18 years of tension headaches often start in much the same way – when I encounter someone who is awkward to chat with. They may talk too intensely or not listen, matters that I strain to cope with. But I realise now that I generally tense up in such situations before I am aware I am doing so – my subconscious is overly aware of such difficulties in times past so it puts me into a defensive, apprehensive, tense state. I tend to notice this only after it has started because most of my conscious attention is on making conversation.

This tense state is the start of a headache – a headache triggered in too many social situations even though I am generally very gregarious, frequently really enjoying chatting with friends and complete strangers alike. I simply do not know when my hair-trigger tendency to go onto a tense, headache inducing state, will occur. By the time I sense that I am tensing up, it is generally too late.

Now none of this would be particularly worth mentioning but for the fact that the headaches tend to last for the rest of the day, often into the night, damaging sleep, and into the next day quite often also.

So a moment’s overreaction to a situation gets rewarded with a headache of average duration of maybe 15 hours. A debilitating, ‘let this day finish and the next start afresh’ type of headache.

Given this accumulated plight, what would you do? Would you avoid people altogether? No, of course not. Would you be on your guard for the slightest hint of tension, withdrawing from a situation as soon as you detected it? No – it is socially very damaging and avoiding situations simply labels them as dangerous, thereby perpetuating the problem. So I carry on much as normal and survive and endure, hoping that by grinning and bearing the problem and ignoring it as much as possible will eventually desensitise my subconscious. Except that after 18 years, there is no sign of this happening.

Do you have any suggestions?

Decades of headache, foggy thinking, and extreme tiredness are tough to endure. Call it mental illness, or whatever, the effect is the same – many days I have spent in a state of struggle to get by. It has been 12 years since I was able to work full time – the 6 before that were tortuous enough to have stopped.

Yet interspersed are days like today. I had slept about 10 hours and did not so much awaken in a refreshed state as one that was liberated from the shackles of fogginess. I could think clearly and proceeded to do some timely computer programming – at great speed, much as when I was young. I am 55 now, but love programming when I can think so lucidly and fast.

By mid evening, when I would normally be ‘surviving’ before going to bed, tired from debilitating head effects I felt fresh, so went for a walk in the mild but dark evening air. And I realised that I was not just free from fogginess, but risen well above that quagmire state. My vision was crystal clear. But everything seemed as if I were seeing it for the first. I know precisely what it is like to walk in a ‘normal’ state of mind, where the familiar around you stay just that, and wash past you. But now a corner of masonry would catch my eye and look like a work of art. A flash of neon would be bold and stark and beautiful. But I was not spaced out – just sensing things with a fresh intensity that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from my normal place of residency.

A little breeze would brush my face and it felt as if the sense of its touch was running in slow motion. I wanted to stop at everything I saw and marvel, much as you would at the equivalent 3d graphics in a PC screen.

The difficult aspect to this was that my senses demanded that I pay homage to their intensity, and this was a little wearing. So I was happy when I started to tire after about 20 minutes, the effect fading a little.

This state was so diametrically opposed to my normal one that it was like suddenly awaking from a nightmare to find you were the Prime Minister.

It may be that today was a short lived manic episode – the insatiably driven state I was in would fit that bill, as I hungered for my programming task to keep feeding me.

And you, the reader, may feel that I am offbeat, eccentric and maybe delusional. Maybe this is true. But if you had experienced such an altered state, you too may have been driven to tell others about it. A kind of hyper-alive state where everyone else looks as if they are in a daze of normality, and where my normal state is floundering in a bath of mud.

But I have to repeat that my vision was crystal clear. A 55 year old should not really be able to see things as lucidly as a teenager, which is how it felt. So it was immensely enjoyable, but at the same time, a bit spooky.

I have always been intrigued by the span of the support rigging of some spiders webs. This was kindled further with a web that hung from lines that stretched about 12 feet across my garden. How the hell did the tiny spider engineer this?

Of course, I have seen Spider man films where he throws a long line to jump from building to building, but it kind of did not occur to me that these tiny little spiders in my garden might actually operate in the same way because I had never seen it in operation, until today.

I sat mesmerised under warm blue skies for 2 hours watching this marvel of agility and spatial awareness build a web.

At one point, perched on a high wire 2 feet above the grass between to plants, he threw 2 or 3 strands out and upwards. Now these are desperately fine lines, yet as strong, weight for weight as tensile steel. I watched stunned as these were fabricated from the tiny spider abdomen, rising upwards, across the garden wall to the middle of the next door garden over the head of my bemused neighbour. Ten foot streams of ultra thin material manufactured ultra fast from a spider less than 1% of their length. They actually failed to latch onto the garden wall (or my neighbour), so the spider returned to nearer matters to construct his web.

He used many techniques to construct it, rapidly using all his limbs in a masterly act of construction, somehow aware of all the rigging and the stages of construction of each part. I took some photos, the first shows the thread from the abdomen being added to the web :

2nd October 2012 A diary of a particularly clear-headed day in my life …

08:30 90 minutes writing code for the ‘Key to the City’ (of Cardiff) web site for someone I had been teaching programming to.
10:00 Wrote a blog entry about mental health following recent observations.
10:20 Weekly shopping trip
10:50 Uploaded designs for two postcards to be sold in cafe by the lake here in Cardiff. Ordered 250 of my swans design, and 100 of a new Cardiff Lake design.
11:20 Coffee shop trip where I met a fascinating East Ender who has recently moved to Cardiff. He used to run a 120 man printing company and now is starting out on web based work. We chatted about education, politics and printing, and will stay in touch. Really down to earth but engaging fellow
12:30 Typed up a review on Amazon of a book “Cardiff now and then” I was sent a copy of last week.
12:45 Resumed web site coding
13:15 Sun is out – time to resume my study of education – my preparation for challenging the government control of children’s education.
13:30 Cooked and ate lunch. Washed up and relaxed a little.
14:00 Resumed web site coding. Dull stuff – even though pretty complex.
14:30 Resumed work on Delphi app to create Kindle Go documents. Interesting stuff.
15:00 Took a break to check out a Go server I am helping beta test, and to go for my daily walk as part of an experiment on the effect of such regular exercise, including cafe pause to meet humans and read on education
16:15 Resumed work on Delphi app
17:00 Done for the day, work-wise.

Such admonishments are frequently directed at people suffering with ‘taboo’ mental health problems, especially chronic depression.

But those who are fortunate not to suffer necessarily tend to see the suffering of others as they would suffer themselves. If they were in a downbeat, slightly depressed mood, they could readily ease their way out of the trap, and therefore think that chronic sufferers can do likewise, albeit with a proportionally greater effort to shift a deeper state.

But this proportional assumption is a key misunderstanding, for lack of proportion is one of the signatures of entrenched mental health. The other is displacement in time – a bout of suffering can appear that is disconnected from any current cause.

So, to repeat, a chronic depression sufferer will have symptoms that are an amplification of any causal event on the day. And they can have a general depressed state that bears no relation to their current thinking – it is background feeling of deep discontent that has a long term momentum, and is virtually immune to requests by others to ‘just snap out of it’.

But if you have not experienced either of these enslaving factors of mental ill-health, you will likely fail to understand or empathise with a chronic sufferer. This is part of the taboo perpetuation of mental health issues I feel.