"Hearing Voices" - by Eric Coates

I recently had the good fortune to reconnect with an old high school friend who I had lost touch with after college. Eric and I really got to know each other senior year of high school, and then spent a lot of time hanging out together on college breaks. I think we lost touch around senior year. We both had similar dreams - to be poets and artists. He went off into the publishing world, and I joined the Army and our worlds separated, as they sometimes do.
 
One of the things he shared with Kandie and I as we reconnected through FaceBook was that he had been diagnosed with schizoaffective and bipolar disorders. I wouldn't ordinarily share this information publicly about a friend, but he has written a book about his experiences. It is short and quite well written. His descriptions of his psychoses are quite vivid, and you will find yourself wondering if you are reading a science fiction novel at times - except then you realize you are reading someone's personal struggles to pull himself back to our shared reality. I recommend it if you are interested in a first person account of what I consider one of the most frightening mental illnesses.

leadership

This is a good post about leadership:

In order to engage in a conversation about leadership, you have to assume you have no power — that you aren't "in charge" of anything and that you can't sanction those who are unwilling to do your bidding. If, given this starting point, you can mobilize others and accomplish amazing things, then you're a leader. If you can't, well then, you're a bureaucrat.

rest here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/how_to_lead_when_youre_not_in.html

Bartitsu - really?

Apparently it is a form of "gentlemanly self defense" described in Sherlock Holmes books that has now been brought to life by martial arts practitioners who are fascinated by Steam Punk.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578501101650179998.html

smartphone

I joined the world of smartphone users today - I picked up a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S4. I am very excited to start using it. Figuring out the apps and what not, since they operate a bit differently than the iPad.

So far, I'm in love with the big (for a phone) screen. Looking forward to always being connected, though I probably should not. :)

whose interest is the DSM-5?

The mental health field isn't doing itself any favors by publishing the DSM-5. Or, rather, by trying to do itself favors, it is doing harm, to its credibility and to its "patients":

Why would the APA rush publication in spite of unfinished field trials and failures to find high reliability among clinicians, the very things that their claims to a scientific DSM rely on? Do the math, Mr. Greenberg answers. In recent years, the APA has been steadily losing income from dwindling membership and dwindling ad revenues for its journals. The DSM-IV, which has earned $100 million, keeps the organization in the black. Faced with a looming deadline and terrible data, Mr. Greenberg suggests, the DSM directors did what any reasonable, self-protecting institution would do: They lowered the statistical criteria for acceptable standards of reliability and turned defeat into victory. As Allen Frances puts it in "Saving Normal," they accepted agreements among raters that were "sometimes barely better than two monkeys throwing darts at a diagnostic board."

 more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323716304578481222760113886.html

what happened to "first, do no harm"? 

is "preventive care" expensive?

is "preventive care" expensive? should you seek to have insurance cover it? here is a price list from CVS/Caremark for a range of basic preventive services. You don't need insurance to get these. You can walk into a CVS Minuteclinic and get these on demand for the prices listed.

Screenings

• Basic health screening $59
• Cholesterol screening $59
• Comprehensive health screening $69
• Diabetes screening (glucose) $59

Physical exams

• Administrative physicals $69
• Camp physical $49 (for a limited time!)
• College physical $69
• DOT physical $79
• Sports physical $49 (for a limited time!) 

Other

• Birth control injection $20-$100 
• Ear wax removal $79-$89
• EpiPen refill $59
• Medication renewal (one time) $59
• Pregnancy evaluation $59
• Smoking cessation $59
• TB (tuberculosis) testing $39
• Vitamin B12 injection (prescription required) $21
• Weight loss program - $59 - $69

 http://www.minuteclinic.com/services/wellnessandprevention/

I'm not endorsing CVS or its affiliates - I'm trying to make the point that wellness isn't very expensive, and it's easily accessible.

There are probably cheaper providers elsewhere in your area, but this was easy to grab off the web.

job security is the ability to get a job

Doing some research for my "Creativity and Innovation" course I am putting together as a spring elective and came across this ethnographic paper by Kunda, Barley, and Evans titled "Why Do Contractors Contract?" From the text:

Job security is the ability to get a job. Staff people don’t have job security; you can be fired whenever the company likes. And they don’t have the networks. They can’t call someone and get a job tomorrow morning. They think they have job security but it’s on paper. People don’t realize that real job security is when you have a network of managers and recruiters where you simply call them and say, “OK my contract finished,” and they say, “Great, I can place you somewhere tomorrow morning.” The social reality is, the staff person has no connections to a next job. They don’t have social relationships. They’re isolated. A contractor has these relationships. That’s real job security. That’s the real game.

Fascinating to see a team of sociologists aligning themselves with what libertarian economists have been saying for decades.

The whole paper is available here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/WTO/cgi-bin/docs/Kunda_2002.pdf