SpankyMcFarland

I see Kenney is talking about closing safe-injection sites. https://globalnews.ca/news/6443265/alberta-supervised-consumption-sites-moved-closed/ That’s easy to do and popular with the base but it won’t solve anything. Taking on issues like this is a sign of weakness.

Getting to Vancouver Island is more of a pain than driving about Britain after celebs. After an initial spike, the number of media people who can be spared for this nonsense will fall.

Wearing make-up for a role is a heinous offence now? It’s a silly standard JT helped to create so it’s one he can’t complain about. To answer the question, yes, he is racist. We all are. A great deal of trial and tribulation would be saved if we just admitted we all have tribal tendencies that we struggle to control.

I recognize Israel lives in a dangerous neighbourhood and has the right to defend itself. That does not mean I have to agree with everything Israel does. Again, there is no argument on the PRC, Syria etc etc. That’s why a debate is hard to sustain on those issues here.

Wait a second. China is not part of the Western club. How many of us support the PRC here? Ditto Assad, KSA, Iran. There’s no argument about these regimes. They’re awful. Contrast that with the fulsome declarations of support that Israel regularly receives from the majority of US politicians - chalk and cheese. And claiming it’s all just bigotry is a curious argument to use, one borrowed from the PC left. ‘You disagree with me because you’re racist’ has been a way of trying to shut people up for quite some time. Actually, I believe that everyone is tribal to some extent, so as long as we accept that we are all like this then I’m not too bothered by such accusations. Let he who has not sinned... BTW Canada did not receive criticism from ‘the world’ over this but from a tiny fraction of it. The vast majority of the world sided with Canada here. Haley isn’t so quick to comment on a subject she actually does know something about, Modi’s India. Her praise for the religious fanatics currently running that country says it all.

I never thought they’d win that game even though the result was quite close. They deserve credit for fighting back but would have struggled in the play-offs if they’d won.

At least people in republics who are stupid enough to follow the antics of silly celebs can replace all the objects of their attention whenever they want.

I just don’t get all this British hysteria about every obscure relative of the head of state, and why apparently normal Canadians are getting sucked in as well is utterly beyond me.

The reports from the universities are encouraging: https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iranian-protesters-refuse-to-walk-on-US-Israeli-flags-613944 But how reliable are students as barometers of public opinion in any country? We’ve also seen monotonous ranks of women in chadors mourning Soleimani with little evidence of make-up or sunglasses. In between are ordinary Iranians trying to get by who don’t want any more trouble in their lives. Is another revolution coming?

Take the example of Charlie Wilson, the subject of a light-hearted movie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson's_War_(film) He was part of an American effort to provide Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet soldiers. He had Soviet blood on his hands. Should the Russians have put him and others like him on a kill-list because of that alone?

Say a soldier is sent abroad to assist an insurgency. Is he legitimate drone material afterwards? What about somebody who helped Afghan insurgents kill Soviet soldiers? He would have ‘blood on his hands’. There are many examples around the world like this, some where it would be difficult to discern which side was the government, so a comprehensive list would be a long one.

Involuntary detention of dangerously disturbed patients would still have to exist no matter how many psychiatrists we had in the country. Other countries also struggle to fill these posts - the work is distressing and, despite the many vacancies, the pay remains poor because of our system’s bias towards procedure-related specialties.

Should every country think about a kill-list now? Here is Jim Webb’s take:

I’d like to see Putin following Iran’s lead and finally admitting his country’s role in the downing of MH17.

Somewhat encouraging news. The Iranian govt has to realize that the truth is going to come out with or without its cooperation. Aviation safety is something the whole world has a legitimate interest in and, like the MH370 disaster, answers will be sought until they are found.

Sounds like a sensible division of labour. JT is good at winning elections and photo-ops, and CF is good at the other stuff.

I was talking about the fears people have about psychiatric institutions. However, some people are involuntarily detained longer than that: https://www.legalline.ca/legal-answers/involuntary-hospital-admission-of-mentally-ill-people-and-length-of-stay/ Such legislation has to exist in some form for psychotic patients who are a danger to themselves and others. There’s a natural tension between safety and liberty here; relatives and communities are focused on safety while the patient is more concerned about liberty.

True enough. I had to read that twice to see what I think you were getting at. Chronic schizophrenics often have no jobs, few friends and not much in the way of family connections. I’d say they vote less often than the average punter as well. It’s easy to see why politicians prefer to be opening facilities that care for breast cancer patients or kids. The whole hospital/community care debate in psychiatry is weird if one views the brain as just one more organ that can go wrong and compares care of it with other specialties in that light. For example, patients with heart failure should be cared for at home as much as possible but hospitalization is also occasionally necessary. This obvious truth also applies in neurology, the closest specialty of all to psychiatry.

Making international comparisons on per capita psychiatric beds in general hospitals, mental hospitals and community facilities is a murky business. Suffice to say, if we are even ahead of the Yanks, it ain’t by much: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHBEDS?lang=en And we are way behind many European countries.

I think many of us have a fear of being dragged off to the asylum one day. In my youth I saw an old movie, The Snake Pit, and it greatly disturbed me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake_Pit Of course, psychiatric wards aren't like that any more but it's still an unsettling subject to consider, which is one reason of many why funding for mental health needs to be ring-fenced.

We have the same problems in Canada but they don't seem to attract as much coverage. Here's one article. Again, note the international comparisons on bed numbers: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/mental-health-gap-in-b-c-psych-beds-dwindle-as-community-supports-struggle-to-keep-up Falling number of psychiatric beds in B.C. hospitals 2006-07: 1,305 beds or 30 beds per 100,000 population 2008-09: 1,239 beds or 28 beds per 100,000 population 2010-11: 1,273 beds or 28 beds per 100,000 population 2012-13: 1,242 beds or 27 beds per 100,000 population 2014-15: 1,219 beds or 26 beds per 100,000 population Source: Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) Comparable international rates: The Netherlands: 137 beds/100,000 population (includes beds not counted as psychiatric in other countries) Norway: 89 beds/100,000 population United Kingdom: 58 beds/100,000 population United States: 34 beds/100.000 population New Zealand: 21 beds/100,000 population Source: Mental Health Atlas 2011, World Health Organization

Here's that article by Green. These three sentences drily sum up his thinking on bed closures and community care: Here's are a few articles from the papers on the beds crisis in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/06/hundreds-of-mental-health-beds-needed-to-end-shameful-out-of-area-care https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/21/mental-heath-crisis-beds-shortage-detentions-soar Half the beds in the NHS were once psychiatric beds. Given their progressive disappearance, it's hard to believe that now. Here's a recent official report on bed occupancy. It's rather polite on the subject of community care but you can read between the lines: A letter to the Lancet makes similar points. Note how low our per capita Canadian bed numbers are in the graph:

You'd have to read the community care literature to see what I'm talking about. I can certainly dig them out. After the antipsychotic medication chlorpromazine arrived, utopian predictions were made about caring for nearly all psychotic patients in the community. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine Most of the advocates were well-intentioned but government bean counters saw an opportunity to close the asylums, many of which were awful, and spend the money on politically more popular projects. The UK has a national shortage of psychiatric beds. It closed too many since the Fifties. I think there's an article by Green on that which I will post. I can assure you that both Canada and Ireland also have serious, chronic, national problems with this issue and we can see on our TVs what the US is like. As I noted earlier, I have been listening to complaints by psychiatrists for over thirty years on this issue in Canada. The only comparable problem elsewhere is the growing demographic timebomb of care for the elderly. No other specialty has been so short-changed.

Really? Somewhere in Scandinavia? I don’t know of an English-speaking country that’s carried through on the community care promise. I was going to limit my statement to that and then I got a bit carried away and labelled the entire West with my broad brush which may be unfair. I think the idea arose in Italy and AFAIK they haven’t done so well either, and I spent decades listening to complaints from psychiatrists about the shortage of beds in Canada. If there’s a national model out there we should follow, I’d love to hear about it.