10 Steps To Happiness For Mothers

Submitted by tonyplant on June 28, 2006 - 14:37.

Happy mothers tend to have happy children but with the frenetic pace of combining parenthood with working and other activities means that many parents are neglecting their own well-being. The Daily Mail has an article about an interesting experiment to increase mothers' happiness.

Online support group, Netmums, ran the experiment. They encouraged mothers to follow an adapted version of the Happiness Manifesto that was popularised during the Making Slough Happy series. The women completed questionnaires to assess their baseline level of happiness before participating in the experiment.

On a scale of 1 to 100, the average score was 52. But after following the happiness principles for four weeks, the average score rose to 64 - a rise of over 10 per cent in just 28 days.

Of course, this is not even vaguely a scientific experiment; it is just data collection. However, it is a nice report and it serves to promote the idea that happiness is not mysterious, it can sometimes be a lot simpler than it seems to be. It does again provoke the question, if we had a Happiness Boot Camp, what would it look like?

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Grand Rounds 2:39 Is Up

Submitted by tonyplant on June 27, 2006 - 14:54.

This week's edition of Grand Rounds is hosted and selected by Stuart Henochowicz from Medviews. I am utterly fascinated by the medblog insight into the working lives of people whose jobs make an obvious and direct difference. This week's online peek into the diverse world of medical researchers, healthcare workers, patients and policy makers is as interesting as ever. Like everything else, good medicine relies on techno-stars but depends upon good communication and co-operation.

All of human life is there, from the need for Border Patrol Agents to learn how to cope with a birth in progress to Keith Carlson and how he works with the families of patients who have become friends and who have died.

I commend Grand Rounds to you.

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Big Brother Monitoring Won't Alienate Anyone, Will It?

Submitted by tonyplant on June 26, 2006 - 11:45.

Greetings Comrades, there are exciting proposals that will lead to a revolution in how we raise our children. The government is proposing a database that will track all children from birth in England and Wales. The database will contain a rich assortment of data about children; from "how they are doing in class to whether they are eating enough fruit and veg".

These proposals are nothing like the punitive overtones of the recent Supernanny Initiative. They will form part of a Brave New World in which we will fit children with RFID chips, in-built cameras that will let us know how they interact with their environment and authority figures, and in vivo monitoring that will let us know what they are eating. Repeated failure to achieve the 5 a day target will trigger a reminder text.

Ignoring the fact that this proposal is monumentally unworkable, as should be apparent to anyone who has followed the NHS IT fiasco, what were the proposers of this scheme thinking? Or weren't they? Read Shinga's Since When Have Bureaucracy And Databases Been Synonyms For 'Solution' on this scheme. I will add that there is a lot of evidence that alienation from the environment or social system in which one lives is frequently cited as a factor in depression and anxiety. So, having your children monitored from birth isn't going to unsettle or alienate anyone, is it? It isn't possible that this bold social policy will result in greater levels of depression or mental illness?

read more | 2 comments | social policy | resilience | monitoring | happiness | family life | children | Big Brother

What Is The Cost Of Mental Health For 1 Million Children?

Submitted by tonyplant on June 25, 2006 - 15:48.

Shinga was so fed up at the lack of costings for mental health treatment for children that she has attempted it for herself.

Shinga mentions the need to treat both the child and probably at least one other member of the family. She discusses the 'dispiriting' overlap between mental health problems in children and special educational needs (itself a very costly area). The figures are imperfect and far from comprehensive for the reasons that she describes: nonetheless, it is an interesting and grim read. We are constantly being told that children are our future: is this how we treat them? Is this the best quality investment we are making in the future of our citizens and our economy?

Some commentators greeted the announcement that children in Wellington College are to be taught resilience and happiness with derision. I wonder if the costs of introducing such topics in school would reach more pupils, more quickly, than waiting for the implentation of a large-scale mental health treatment programme that doesn't seem to exist? The children who need more specialised treatment need it. But, in the interim, and for those in the hinterland of having a mental health condition that is not yet serious enough to warrant a psychiatric intervention, what would be the costs of providing Laughter and resilience sessions in schools? The Laughter Leaders could be parent volunteers, local volunteers or maybe even some of the Classroom Assistants. I shall think about this scheme.

 

read more | 1 comment | statement | special educational needs | schools | mental health | economics | children

1 in 10 Children Has A Mental Health Problem That Needs Treatment

Submitted by tonyplant on June 21, 2006 - 13:41.

I was going to discuss the Independent's summary of the British Medical Association's Board of Science report  that 1 in 10 Children Has A Mental Health Problem That Needs Treatment. However, Shinga has reviewed the summary and associated comment and finds them striking for their "poverty of imagination".

I agree with Shinga that the report tells us nothing that would startle anyone's granny. Children don't have the luxury of time. Speaking to the Independent, Avis Johns of YoungMinds, the mental health charity, said:

The majority of adults with mental illness are able to trace their symptoms back to childhood. It is essential we act now to prevent generations of children being blighted.

 

I couldn't agree more - but what is Avis Johns proposing? Sure Start isn't working. Hand-wringing isn't working - but then, it's not supposed to. The extra investment isn't working (but like the expensive Sure Start programme - that's getting to be old news). UnLtd funds lots of innovative projects that are aimed at improving family life or the physical, emotional and cognitive well-being of children. Do we need more seed-corn projects like that?

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What Am I Bid For This Part Of My Life?

Submitted by tonyplant on June 20, 2006 - 15:10.

Following on from yesterday's exploration of Putting Your Life Out To Tender I'm wondering about what bids we might attract for different areas of our life. If you were auctioning off areas of your life like happiness, family relationships, career, health etc. how would you describe them, and what value of bid would they be likely to attract? Do you eat a healthy diet? If you had valuable traits like high resilience, how much would that be worth? Of course, having read Shinga's piece on genetic determinism, how much is your gene profile worth? And is your environment adding to your nett worth or causing a major economic deficit?

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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Putting Your Life Out For Tender

Submitted by tonyplant on June 19, 2006 - 14:23.

Greavsie has had the splendidly lunatic/inspired idea of putting his life out to tender. He is inviting offers:

in 6 operating areas:

• Family greavsie
• Work greavsie
• Social greavsie
• Love-life greavsie
• Spiritual greavsie and;
• Intellectual greavsie

Interesting operating areas. A while back, everyone seemed to be quoting Phil McGraw's comment that if most people had a Life Manager who was responsible for the current state of their life, they would sack that manager.

If you had managers responsible for life operating areas that were important to you - like health, resilience, happiness, career etc. would you be sacking them after their latest disappointing performance reviews, or giving them a bonus?

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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Paediatric Grand Rounds 1:5 Is Up

Submitted by tonyplant on June 18, 2006 - 17:11.

Paediatric Grand Rounds 1:5 is up, courtesy of Clark Bartram at Unintelligent Design.

There are several controversial topics in this collection of posts. It certainly is one thing to talk to adults about lifestyle choices that have an impact on their health, it is another to discuss adult behaviours and adult-supported lifestyle choices that have a profound impact on children's health. Here, I particularly have in mind Flea's post about a drug-seeking mother and Shinga's response on the consequences of a chaotic home life on children's health; plus Megan's account of finding gallstones in two young patients.

There are several excellent posts on parents perspectives (scroll down to the June 5th entry) and perspectives on neuro-developmental disorders. There are illustrations of contents of a newborn's nappy that might startle the unwary parent and a touching video made for a child recovering in PICU after a kidney transplant.

read more | add new comment | medblogs | Grand Rounds | children

Aren't Assumptions Fascinating?

Submitted by tonyplant on June 17, 2006 - 08:15.

Assumptions are fascinating. Even in the days of the internet when we stagger around from one information source to another, and you have no means of understanding someone's information route, we can still make the most interesting assumptions. The theory of six degrees of separation means that anyone can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. This seems like an awfully small chain, and yet there is no sense of connection with the end-point of that chain. I think this is responsible for the feeling that we can be light-years away from the information that we need on the internet and still have the seductive feeling of adjacency - "Just one more click and then I'll find it". Or, why can we still be surprised when we come across the most unexpected pieces of information (a voluntary end-point) that we might never have suspected to exist (particularly not in relation to where we started)?

For instance. We sing during Happystance workshops. I like spoofs and parodies written to well-known tunes, like those at which includes the excellent I Swear This Is the Last Time I'll Go Boating With Odysseus.

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When Will The Vacant Lot Be Developed?

Submitted by tonyplant on June 14, 2006 - 14:04.

When I saw the rubble with the provocative question, "What happens when edifices of network TV are rubble and the vacant lot has yet to be developed?" I wondered if the same is true of lots of social conventions, like consumerism and hedonism. Both of them are valuable and have their strengths - but they do seem to be crumbling in their anecdotal strength with reports of a decline in shopping and doubts about the health impacts of binge drinking.

A number of social commentators lament the impact of marriage or relationship breakdown, particularly where children are involved. It seems as if we have crumbling edifices but lots of vacant lots waiting to be developed because we don't know what should take their place. What do we want? What do people need? Are these the same question?

I've been thinking about this because it's Carers' Week and although I've had a good response to the workshops that I've run, I've met a lot of carers who are angry about what has happened to their lives and the lack of support they receive. Some of the carers I met say that they feel like anachronisms. They are abiding by their understanding of family responsibility and loyalty and almost literally being beggared for it while being treated with what feels like contempt by many of the statutory agencies. SOme of them feel that they have traded in their desire for security and a fulfilling career for present discomfort, financial insecurity and worry about their own futures. Yet, what would happen to our social and healthcare systems if carers disowned their sense of obligation and responsibility (a question that I've asked before when wondering what is the cost of doing nothing?)?

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