Category: Health and Safety

Books, Health and Safety1 Comment

Eluded emotions

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In Sociopath,  confessions of a wife, mother and cat-choker having dark urges of stealing for thrills, joyrides, and gate-crashing at strangers’ funerals  – all a fascinating first-hand account of antisocial personality disorder. After the pencil attack she decided to steer clear of violence- not because she felt bad but because it attracted too much attention. She resolved  to finding ways of dealing with her anxiety that would allow her to fly beneath the radar. Named as the most anticipated book of 2024 by Vulture, LitHub, The Guardian, and Cosmopolitan. A fascinating and revelatory memoir revealing the author’s struggle to come to terms with … Continue reading Eluded emotions

Books, Finance, Health and Safety1 Comment

AI says NO…

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“ A corporation, or a government department isn’t a conscious being,  but it is an artificial Intelligence, it has the capability to take decisions which are completely distinct from the intentions of any of the people who compose it. And under stressful conditions, it can go stark raving mad”. Big organisations often make terrible decisions, and how the world lost its mind, have you ever waited for a board to fight recently?  When to avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generates outcomes that everyone … Continue reading AI says NO…

Books, Health and Safety, technology1 Comment

Smartphones, gaming, Sleep deprivation and addiction rewiring childhood

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Social psychologist, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt,  reveals why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases in recent years. Haidt’s International bestselling author of the Righteous Mind  (2012, looking at the role of emotion and reason in moral convictions) and The Coddling of the American Mind, (2018, co-written with Greg Lukianoff describing a culture of “Safetyism” in which helicopter parents and educators protect their young charges from potential har, including even thoughts), Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood … Continue reading Smartphones, gaming, Sleep deprivation and addiction rewiring childhood

Books, Health and Safety1 Comment

Eccentric pioneers of mind-altering drugs

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After 14 years to isolate the analgesic substance in poppy resin, the German pharmacist Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner decided to test a promising crystalline substance on himself and three teenagers from down the road, in 1817, to explore the hidden regions of the mind. He run previous identical tests on dogs killing one of them. After a few doses, all participants fell into a stupor and they could  very well have died but for a semi-conscious Sertürner hadn’t groped his way to some extra strength vinegar and poured it down everyone’s throats triggering severe vomiting. He  named the new substance as morphine after the … Continue reading Eccentric pioneers of mind-altering drugs

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NHS, the first universal health system available to all is 75 years

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5th July 2023 marks National Health Service, 75 years of service,  that are free for all at the point of delivery, treating over a million people a day in England. In 1948, Ministries of Health and Labour, with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council and the Royal College of Nursing began a massive recruitment drive throughout the West Indies to recruit staff to the NHS. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, a Labour MP,  introduced the free service, based on a 1942 cross-party report established the principle of the NJHS, which until them had been founded on insurance-based schemes … Continue reading NHS, the first universal health system available to all is 75 years

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Willful failure to safeguard the wellbeing of children

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The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) based at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in North London, was set up initially to provide – for most part-taking therapies to young people who were questioning their gender identity. In the last decade GIDS has referred more than thousand children, some as young as nine years old, for medication to block their puberty and then cross-sex hormones, which cause irreversible changes to the body. While some young people thrive after taking the blocker, many seemed to become worse. As the number of young people seeking GIDS’s advice exploded, increasing twenty-five-fold, the profile of … Continue reading Willful failure to safeguard the wellbeing of children