Every time I write, I seem to take longer than intended and write more than intended. I think right now, I just want to talk, to get out my emotions, experiences, hopes, fears, questions, concerns, and random existentialist thoughts. Eventually I will move all this stuff to the pages format which I have set up for my travel journals.
My Current Situation:
As far as I can tell, my issues right now are social isolation and burnout. I think my current phase of this started during my PhD and has gotten worse over time. Granted, considering the current level of knowledge of and respect for mental health concerns in society, I have no certainty in this.
Basically, my difficulty in life is that I think slowly, get overwhelmed easily, learn differently, and have different needs than others. Trying to be involved or included in things is a constant struggle for me, as I often can't find opportunities, and opportunities which do exist are not well fit to me, and trying to do things on my own basically destroys me.
My general experience in life is that either you do what others are doing, how they are doing it, or do things on your own. The notion that others will make room for you tends not to happen in practice. I would say this is especially true for invisible disability, but people don't tend to interpret the needs of others very well in any case.
Doing everything on my own is extremely draining for me as well as alienating when I am forced to do it alone, especially when I need help. And the list of things which are difficult or exhausting for me often includes things that people would not think of as potentially problematic.
My Experience at the Hospital:
When I got into Kingston in September 2018, I had started having issues. Basically, if I were to walk for more than ~ 28 km per week, I would break down, start crying, have trouble with balance, and start having a sense of despair. I had been going into the walk-in clinics to try to get treatment, but the couldn't really do anything. By the end of October, I had kind of felt like I had gotten to the point where I could no longer take care of myself, and decided to go into the emergency room.
The first problems occurred before I got to the doctor. Basically, they want to take the EKG, blood sample, and urine sample from everyone who goes in there. I have a lot of difficulty with needles (a common problem), and they basically had no patience for this. Unlike other times for which I had my blood taken, where they try to find a way to make it work, here they basically called me a troublemaker for not cooperating.
When I finally got to see the doctor, he asked me why I was there, and I told him what I knew. He was not happy with my response, and proceeded to ask the same questions in a harsher and harsher tone. This caused me to break down and start crying. I also attempted to call people I knew on the phone, in order to get help talking to this individual, but there was no phone signal and I didn't have Wi-Fi. The doctor also got annoyed at me for refusing to have blood drawn. (Although, I might point out that I never refused this, I only stated that I have trouble with needles, and they were kind of impatient about the process.)
Eventually the doctor referred me to the outpatient mental health program at the hospital. I apologized for the difficulty, then had them call a taxi to take me home.
The whole incident was kind of traumatic for me, and I was afraid to go back there later.
Follow up:
So, after you go to a hospital in Canada, they will start sending you mail regularly asking for donations. At least it is better than the US, where you get a ridiculously high bill, but still, a hospital is not a charity, it is critical infrastructure, and should be funded by the government. But the government kind of underfunds the hospitals, so the hospitals are left asking for donations to enable them to maintain a reasonable level of functionality.
Basic general observations (or lessons) from this:
A) The hospitals and health care system were in crisis before there was a pandemic. This is one of those things that everyone wants their tax money to go to, but the politicians typically undervalue when they develop the budgets. It is especially amusing / scary to see implications that medical professionals had been doing pandemic readiness modeling and simulation games before the pandemic, yet not only did they not get the supplies they requested, but they had been forced to reduce their availability before the crisis due to reduced funding.
B) Our societies don't value mental health or know how to deal with mental health issues. In the UK, I was able to get a GP much easier after I finally got an address, but they still had no public resources for mental health care. It appears often that unless you actually try to commit suicide, it is impossible to get treatment. Basically, if people die, others freak out, but if people don't die, others just assume that there is no issue and the people with issues are just being troublemakers. Basically, if you can't see the issue, there is no issue, even though we know this is wrong.
C) People instinctively assume ill intent in the case of lack of ability or unmet needs. This is a perpetual problem I have experienced. I think my struggles with disability and other aspects of life have allowed me to experience enough that I know what people expect of others can often be unrealistic or misguided. Sometimes it is a little weird when I get in conversations, and the other person assumes ill intent of others in a certain circumstance, and I freak out, as if my life or freedom is in danger. Because often it is -- if this individual did not know me, they would interpret my actions in this way as well. And I have had many situations when people have done just this -- assumed I was being selfish or a troublemaker because I had certain needs which differed from others or didn't know what to do or just wanted my needs to also be taken into account in a situation.
And, yes, a surprising amount of problematic behavior is caused by alienation / social isolation issues, or other underlying issues.
A Summary of My Views of the Pandemic:
In terms of the appropriate response to the pandemic: I am against reacting, and for carefully planned responses, cost-benefit analyses, and long term planning. I am less for or against lockdown as I am against the whole reacting emotionally rather than actually calculating what best benefits the quality of life of people.
That being said, sometimes I find just watching how people react to crisis quite amusing, and seem to have been able to just consider people's poor crisis management skills as part of the crisis. If human emotion is thought of as a natural disaster, it is not so frustrating to deal with. And it is just as predictable and unavoidable as any other part of nature.
What we should be doing: In times of war, in the modern world, governments have increased the emphasis on the war economy: repurposing buildings and factories, conscripting people to serve a soldiers. Most of the things I think have been going on, except for the recruiting of new medical workers. The number of people in medicine is not fixed, most of the training is by practicing the craft, we will need more people later, and this would fix both the underwork and overwork problem at the same time. And unlike killing people, medicine is a useful skill to have in the general populace.
Hopes:
- A slowing down of our society and a recalculation of priorities -- because we are just trying to push economic growth faster and faster, but it is not actually increasing the well-being of our people, and often actually making it worse.
- More investment into healthcare, especially if we can get the money, attention, and resources out of the security state in the process. This second part is not going to happen, but would be extremely useful. You don't even need to remove the people or money from these industries, either. Just train the police and soldiers as doctors, nurses, social workers, etc. instead of to distrust or kill people.
- More solidarity, empathy, socialization within the community, mental health support. Because we need each other to survive.
...
Fears:
- Increased surveillance or authoritarianism -- This happened after 9/11, for instance. It is quite common for those in charge to exploit a crisis in order to solidify their power or pass unpopular legislation.
- Increased reliance on the internet -- The internet is a wonderful tool, but we do need to participate in the real world and not just live online.
Philosophy:
Here are a couple more Slavoj Zizek coronavirus articles: 1, 2
I also keep on remembering Dan Carlin talking about the atomic bomb "Logical Insanity"
Here is someone talking about the experience of people used to dealing with disasters.
Social Isolation vs. Quarantine, Sample Articles:
I don't want to give you too many of these, as they are summaries or opinions, I don't have the greatest of sources, and I tend to disagree with certain aspects of their analyses while liking other parts. What is here is intended to give a decent summary of the various issues, written by people who are in the medical profession.
This appears to be a decent summary of the issues with the coronavirus lockdowns. He doesn't talk about the risks of society breaking down from either doing nothing or poorly planned lockdowns, but he describing things from the point of view of a medical professional. He also starts by saying that he agrees with the social distancing measures if that is what his colleagues in other specializations recommend, which is important, since I have read things talking about such issues which seem more to come from a denial state.
Here is another individual talking about the dangers of lockdowns. He has a bit of a denial tone in his writing, but he does talk about the societal breakdown risks from shutting everything down (without being all "but democracy" or "but the economy"). I personally believe that the "do nothing" or "wait and see" approaches also have many of the same issues as the "quarantine everything" mentality, and we do need to act expecting the worst case scenario, even while acknowledging that it may not be the case. What is the expression: "Plan for the worst, hope for the best." Something like that. I tend to like these, because they point out the flaws in our current pandemic management strategy, but they tend to be very bad at talking about alternatives, or even acknowledging that these issues also exist in the "do nothing" type approaches.
This one has more of a neutral tone as well as ending with the warning to watch more than just coronavirus related things, as politicians can sneak in problematic legislation while nobody is watching. I want to point out that I have friends who are activists, and one of them has talked about the issues of trying to get media coverage for his campaign. [With the environmentalists and peace activists, things are kind of more corona-adjacent, like demands to end sanctions, for instance, which do tie into the current crisis, but technically existed before it.]
This is one general summary of issues with loneliness, unrelated to the virus. You can find many more.
Annual Death Rate:
So, I know it is a difficult to know what to do with this information. Basically, if this can take you out of either a denial (reminding young people that they are still vulnerable) or panic (reminding people that death is normal, and we survive despite this many people dying per year) state, then that is good, while if it causes denial (because if death is normal, we don't need to do anything about it, right?) or panic, then that is bad.
I think my mentality behind looking at this is to get people out of just thinking about the crisis in terms of number dead from the disease. The reason health professionals recommended that we take steps to minimize infection was to prevent the hospitals from being overwhelmed, thus multiplying the death rate just from the disease by a factor of 10 (or something like that) and also preventing others who need treatment for other issues from getting it, further increasing the number of deaths or long-term injury. Besides, the "flattening the curve" plots have the same number of people getting infected, just over a longer period of time.
Here is a comparison of Covid-19 death rates to the yearly death rate. This is the risk of death if you get sick with Covid-19 vs a year of living, not the total number of expected deaths or reduction of life expectancy due to the pandemic (although there may be estimates based on primitive models), which could potentially involve non-Covid-19 deaths caused by the conditions of the pandemic, whatever they may be.
This particular chart from the CDC for the US highlights accident, homicide, and suicide. Probably also relevant for Covid-19 would be to highlight the Influenza & Pneumonia cells as well. (Yes, it does make the top 10, even in years without a pandemic.) You can also look up the general Wikipedia page, or CDC page, for instance.
Other:
This was the video of the American hikers who were lured across the Iran / Iraq border and imprisoned in Iran for a while, which triggered a feeling of relation for me when I watched it in 2014. I don't think it is necessarily relevant, but it is interesting.
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