Five Domains - Five Gyres

There are five domains in Hodges' model that can help us assess, plan and formulate health and social care, support reflection upon interventions and evaluate progress over time. An aide-memoire indeed!

individual
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

	Brain Plasticity
	Plastic Brain

With five domains to support short and longer-term memory do we really need to force the oceans to remember when we fail to care...?

Sense making? miss-il-es civil-ians te-ears

individual

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

tears	tears
civilians to defend m i s s i l e s	m i s s i l e s to defend civilians

Source: Various news media over several days - current and past...
 

Society (global trends?) that diminishes the greatest gifts

Last December 15th -16th Harry Eyres' column The Slow Lane in the FT Weekend (p.24) pointed me to the New Economic Forum's pamphlet entitled The New Materialism. Mr Eyres wrote about the The most precious gifts and the fact that things do not last like they used to. Quality lies in things that last, things that are worth repairing and repairable.

The piece prompted me to think back about some of the children's toys. Very gratefully received as gifts, guilt sprung when more of an impulse (impelled) buy: what about the amount of plastic, the oil, the probable lack of longevity in use, the longevity in decay and the some-other-where of waste and disposal?

Recall then the joys of the wooden train set, with non-toxic paint... The toy flung aside as the cardboard box is tossed, turned and crawled into and puzzled about. The reflection took me around a few towns too, the pound shops. It's good when you really can afford to make a choice about what you buy, about quality. The hammer, clearly not ready for hand: unbalanced once home. I'm not saying all 'cheap' screwdrivers are the same, but the slightest amount of torque and the handle is undone. Probably the one cheap find and sometimes free are the watchmaker's screwdriver sets. Eye-saving when the screw on the side of my glasses comes loose and the lens falls out on something soft thus far.

All the mass production and lack of love and care invested in making things - the loss of true craft, as Mr Eyres points out, makes me wonder whether this also pollutes the way we value our health.

Like so much advertising - conditioning - we recognize the true significance of what is happening only when forced to and we ourselves suffer a failure and 'break' in some way, to some degree.

This issue is provoking various responses. An example being Beck's Song Reader, an album released solely as sheet music.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0b4a2066-06f8-11e2-92b5-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2NyOTAcgA 

Spaces that Speak*: Theatrum Mundi / The Global Street

Even as I search for extraterrestrials we are creatures of space.

The Agora in
400 BCE

Womb, swaddling clothes, crib, play pen, 'home', garden, neighbourhood, community, village, town, city...

Here on W2tQ cognitive and conceptual space is the focus. Hodges' model provides a space for individual or group reflection. In addition to providing a conceptual space the model can represent our physical spaces, our social spaces - incorporating the various means of denoting relationships be that social network, family - genogram, or community group.

As a unit of 'civilization' there should be civic spaces in villages, towns and cities.  This is frequently not a 'civil' space as might be envisaged in the political sense. In contemplating the health of the individual we must also see the group, the citizens and ultimately the global community. If in future individual's must assume greater responsibility for their health, through which space will that responsibility be communicated? Will the channel of choice be the 2nd, or 3rd household TV, the PC-laptop screen; smart phone or merely the Parliamentary debate?

Where is 'public space', where can women and children meet in safety, where can free speech be voiced, be heard? If the presence and stability of public space is not an indicator of 'public health' what is it? What is the impact of policy? When cars are removed from an inner town and the area pedestrianised does a public space follow - the people as they walk by(e)? Can philosophy break out of our pubs and into other public spaces?

The following initiative is centered upon only three cities Frankfurt, London and New York, but will hopefully provide some insights:

Theatrum Mundi / The Global Street 

- is a new urban forum. It seeks to understand what brings life to a city, particularly in its public places and asks how these might be better designed. It brings architects and town planners together with performing and visual artists to reimagine the public spaces of twenty-first century cities.

 
*and listen.

My source: Heathcote, E., Design. A breath of fresh air for public spaces. FT Weekend 27-28 October 2012. 4-5.

Image source: http://mkatz.web.wesleyan.edu/grk201/GRK201.Agora.400.html

reVision Launch, 20th September 2012, Liverpool, UK

My source: MHHE list

Invitation to the Launch of reVision (formerly The Joint Forum)

We are a coalition of radical activists who believe in the social model of mental health.
We are seeking to be a voice for change by promoting and exploring knowledge and understandings of the social, economic and political causes of mental distress, and by proposing socially derived alternatives to medicalised approaches.

 Our vision is a society in which the social causes of mental distress are understood and treated with socially based solutions that improve individual lives and bring about wider social change.

We are launching our organisation on Thursday 20th on September 2012
At Liverpool John Moores University, Room 5.04, Avril Robarts, 79 Tithebarn Street,
Liverpool, L2 2ER from 1.00 to 4.00pm

We will be welcoming new members to the organisation at the launch, and are looking for people who seek radical alternatives to psychiatry and who have a critical, political understanding of the social causes of mental distress.

Our keynote speakers will be:

• Helen Spandler, member of Asylum and contributer to Critical Psychiatry
• Malcolm Kinney, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Social Work: LJMU
• Phil O’Hare, Senior Lecturer: School of Social Work: UCLAN
• Naphtali Titus Chondol, mental health activist
• Jackie Patiniotis, freelance researcher with a particular interest in women’s mental health and working to end violence against women and girls

More info in the Who_we_are_looking_for PDF.

Please email revision.liverpool at hotmail.co.uk to confirm your attendance.