Meme and other random stuff.

[abelina]

#1 - Meme.  Stolen from alwaysjbj 
I won't post the blank meme but these are my answers:

1. Your Middle Name: Jen
2. Age: nearly 28
3. Single or Taken: taken
4. Favourite Film: oh God, who knows?  Too many!
5. Favourite Song or Album: Um . . . also too many?
6. Favourite Band/Artist: I like a lot of people but I'd have to say my all-time fav is definitely the Beatles.
7. Dirty or Clean: Clean but cluttered :D
8. Tattoos and/or Piercings: Um, nine ear piercings, one bellybutton (that nobody else sees!) and a tattoo on my back.
9. Do we know each other outside of LJ?: If you consider the YM and email outside, sure. Otherwise, no.
10. What's your philosophy on life? It's short.  So you better make the most of it while you're here.
11. Is the bottle half-full or half-empty? That honestly depends on the situation!
12. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest? I really don't know!
13. What is your favourite memory of us? I'm not sure we have enough memories for me to have a favourite, but bonding over Siamese cats was nice.
14. What is your favourite guilty pleasure? That would have to be fanfic.  More like "secret" pleasure, because only one of my RL friends (other than my husband) knows about my fan fic obsession.
15. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you: I'm good at my job but it's not what I want to do for the rest of my life.
16. You can have three wishes (for yourself, so forget all the 'world peace etc' malarky) - what are they? Um . . . to stay healthy until I'm old, to finish every single WIP on my computer, and um, I'd really like a plate of eggs benedict right about now.
17. Can we get together and make a cake? - Your kitchen or mine?  And who can we find to foot the bill for the uber-long plane ride?
18. Which country is your spiritual home? - Canada.  It's also my actual home.
19. What is your big weakness? - chocolate.  Spike.  Preferably in combination.
20. Do you think I'm a good person? Yep
21. What was your best/favourite subject at school? English and chemistry.
22. Describe your accent: I would say "Canadian" but then that would bring to mind the stereotyical "eh, yah hoser" and such that you hear on television and that is completely not me.  I have never used "eh" (like the long letter a sound) in conversation.  I would say it's not much different from the accents of most people in the North West USA.  I was in Washington State once and the woman at the motel asked, when she leared we were Canadian, "but where are your accents?!".  People from Eastern Canada and the Maritime provinces have a different accent than I do.  If you know the actress Jill Hennessy from Law & Order and Crossing Jordan, that'd be close (she's Canadian, too).  Actresses Pam Anderson and Kim Cattrall are from my area so there are some other examples.
23. If you could change anything about me, would you? About you?  I can't think of anything.
24. What do you wear to sleep? Very little.
25. Trousers or skirts? Jeans.  I own one skirt that I wear to every skirt-required function because I'm sooo not a dressy person.
26. Cigarettes or alcohol? No cigarettes.  An occasional alcoholic beverage.
27. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together? (If you have no idea, just say something crazy, it'll entertain me!) - Um, let's go find a big ol' box of blond hair dye, hit Wal-Mart for some black jeans and a tee, and rob a leather coat store, kidnap James, and force him to be Spike for the day.
28. Will you repost this so I can fill it out for you? Kinda did!


#2 - Happy birthday to the Beast (the Kid) on June 10.  She's *gasp* nine.



#3 - I discovered a new television show a couple of weeks ago.  It's one of those late-season entries and I have found that I really like it after only two episodes (I missed the premier).  It's called Mental, and it's on Fox (or Global for us Canadians).  It's about Dr. Jack Gallagher, an English physican who has recently taken over as head of a psychiatric ward.  The show is entertaining and such, but the big reason I like it is the subject matter.  It explores mental health, which is something that has major stigmas attached to it, but does so from the point of view of acceptance.  So often people with mental health issues are seen/labeled as crazy or insane (Dr. Gallagher has said that he neither likes nor understands those terms!!), rather than having a genuine health concern.  People aren't ridiculed or shunned for having pneumonia or suffering a heart attack, right?  The main reason, I think, is a reaction of fear.  People don't always know a lot about it, and what they do know may be misleading or incorrect, and so naturally, we humans react to the unknown by fearing it.  This show portays the patients as humans who just happen to have a health concern of the mental nature, and more importantly, shows a doctor who genuinely cares about helping them.  If you haven't seen it, check it out.

Comments

[abelina.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose we can't have every doctor be like him, but at least they aren't showing every admit to the psych ward as a deranged murderer or someone starting fires because the voices told them to.

And thanks :D

[ars-longa.livejournal.com]

Well, it's really much more complicated than that. Much, much more. Also, the 'voices' sufferers are a vast minority in most psych yards. Although, of course, the general public think otherwise, in reality, in an average psych hospital, they constitute for about 1/10 of the patients.

The others? Mood disorders (which are real in, appr. 1/2 cases, and that's a generous estimation), borderlines, and plain drug-seekers. People who want to be cared for and know how to use the system to get us to do that. At practically any point 1/3 of the patients in our hospital are frequent flyers, who come for free bed, free food, free drugs and free staff members to throw a tantrum onto.

[abelina.livejournal.com]

Oh I know that it's complicated, my examples were there to be a generalization of the sort of thing people think. I know it well. Yes, a lot of people hear voices but it's not always about "starting fires", right? We have our share of frequent flyers in the medical/surical wards, too, whose psych histories play major roles in their supposed medical problems. Read this (http://abelina.livejournal.com/7003.html) post of mine for a good example of drug- and attention-seeking. I know they exist and I know it's prevalent. I deal with it daily even though I don't work in psych (and in my hospital, pshych won't take anyone with more than a sniffle of a medical condition, no matter how much they might need it.) However, I think that a TV show that attempts to show that not everyone who needs psychiatric help is a system-abuser or a "phsychopath", is a good thing. Because, as you know, there are a lot of complexities involved in mental health and people with genuine problems deserve some support.

[ars-longa.livejournal.com]

I think it's pretty much preaching to a choir. Genuine problems get so much support that under cover of said support we throw help at people who might or might not have a sniffle of a real problem. And when 9 out of 10 people are simply using the system to get attention, drugs, food, anything but help, the real problems are drowning in that sea of pretense. More than that, people who come really to get help the first time around quickly realize (or get taught by frequent flyers) that they can use the system, and voila! someone who used to come for help now comes just because life is easier in a hospital. Not to mention that the resources of the system are not limitless.

I'd much rather someone made a movie in which that overabuse of our way too lenient system was depicted properly. Probably then the laws that tells us that we can't refuse help to someone who comes and tell us he's suicidal (for the fifth time in 2 months) might be relaxed. And then we won't have to have people with real psychotic and mood disorders outnumbered by borderlines and users 5 to 1.

And that's just scratching the surface. I really don't want to go deeper. It's so screwed up. I really do want to help mentally ill people. The problem is that my time at work is getting predominantly wasted on people who simply pretend to be so in order to get the goodies. And they have all the support created and nurtured by abovementioned, no doubt endowed with all the good intentions, movie-makers.