Most powerfully, a changemaking mindset doesn’t just diagnose a problem – it opens a door to say that public institutions can change. If problems are public and shared, then they aren’t just your problem, they are “our” problem. Collective problems are not just something we need to privately grin and bear, they are things we can change. Our collective mental health might be fucked – but we can unfuck it if we turn our thinking on its head and change the institutions that keep triggering the problem.
Political life in America is already a bad trip for many. What could the Biden Admin be planning for?
President Joe Biden’s administration “anticipates” that regulators will approve MDMA and psilocybin within the next two years for designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD and depression respectively. The administration is “exploring the prospect of establishing a federal task force to monitor” the emerging psychedelic treatment ecosystem, according to the letter sent by assistant secretary for mental health and substance use Miriam Delphin-Rittmon to Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa.
Clinical trials using magic mushrooms, ecstasy and other psychedelic drugs in potential breakthrough therapies for debilitating mental illnesses will be funded by the federal government as part of global efforts to advance innovative treatments. There is growing international evidence showing substances such as ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA can successfully treat resistant mental illnesses, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, when used in a controlled environment and supported by psychiatric care.
A coalition of more than 20 disability organisations released a statement yesterday setting out significant concerns over the federal government’s plans to introduce independent assessments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
“He was just a good kid. He had a genius IQ, just smart, nice to everybody; loves old people, dogs, the whole thing,” she said. “And then he just got weird.”
This is an area in which the NDIS fails to address and the service shows its ignorance and reluctance to even try. People without family supports aren’t capable with dealing with the bureacracy which polices them out of the system altogether rather than protects them. Trust is totally lost in others and in onesself and hiding from any welfare seems the most rational option for everyone. (ODT)
“You’re wasting resources trying to provide mental health services to people who don’t have stable housing,” Ms Smith said.
Historically, the mental health system included accommodation because people were ‘housed’ in institutions. When institutions closed there was an expectation patients would be accommodated in public housing, or in housing with supports attached.
But this deinstitutionalisation took place at a time when Australian governments were reducing their investment in social housing, creating a “perfect storm”,
The role of mental health remains in the background in these discussions surely what we have heard is that it was a major factor in this case as it was with Haider and Man Monis. (ODT)
source of confusion, in an age in which much ugly politicking has been conducted using shameless fear-mongering targeting vulnerable communities, is the belief that some communities, such as the Somali community, are rife with extremism. This is simply not true.
There is a limited problem with youth within the Somali diaspora being targeted by recruiters for terrorist networks like al-Shabaab, IS and al-Qaeda. But it is simply not the case that police and community leaders are failing to properly monitor dangerous individuals.
The risk of terrorism, from whatever quarter – and the continued threat of right wing extremism in the United States is a reminder of future threats that may come to Australia – is not going away any time soon.
There are no easy answers but what is clear is that simplistic responses only increase the threats and hand to the terrorists a victory they should never be given.
When money isn’t the solution and politics is guaranteed to fail the community’s most vulnerable by increasing the risk of their stress and isolation. (ODT)
“The average NDIS package value is nearly three times the average level of funding clients currently receive through the Mental Health Community Support Services program,” Martin Foley, Victoria’s Minister for Housing, Disability, and Ageing, said in a statement.”
But for Mr Gibbard, that essential service is changing with the transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Ms Stringer’s visits will end by December.
She works for the not-for-profit social and health agency EACH, and her support work is funded through Victoria’s Mental Health Community Support Service (MHCSS).
As the NDIS rolls out in areas of Victoria, the MHCSS is being wrapped up.
Right now, there are more than 900 full and part-time workers in Victoria doing mental health outreach paid for by the MHCSS.
By July next year — when the NDIS fully rolls out across the state — there will be none.
“It’s a shame because we’re going to be losing a lot of workers who are really skilled in mental health,” Ms Stringer says.
In the twisted world of David Brooks and those like him, civility only applies to those of us on the left.
I beg to differ, and so does our former Managing Editor, Dave Neiwert. Please watch and share these shining examples of right-wing “civility.”
Oh hey, also? Charlottesville Nazis got a permit to march in Washington, DC on the anniversary weekend of Heather Heyer’s murder. That alone is heinous, but it is just one example of the empowered hard right wing. If we don’t start fighting back, I’m not sure we’ll have anything left to fight for.
Disability pensioner John, beaten by police officers, apparently had mental health issues. He should be thankful he did not share the fate of many other mentally ill people who have had confrontations with the police. John is still alive. Last year a report by the Australian Institute of Criminology showed that nearly half of all people shot by police had mental health problems. Being mentally ill should never be a reason for being shot, but the data suggests that it is. John, perversely, was lucky.
A mentally ill man who was shot by police at a busy Westfield forecourt was granted day release from a mental health facility despite expressing homicidal tendencies towards police.
“I think I’m stuck,” Louis* said when I asked why he had come to see me. “I finished my commerce degree last year and I started in a job, which I thought was going to be fine. And it is … but I’ve started feeling really anxious again, like when I was a teenager.” I glanced down at the referral for a psychological consultation from his GP. “Thank you for seeing Louis, aged 23, for opinion and management of Generalised Anxiety Disorder? Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia?”
A substance produced after taking the drug ketamine could be used to create a fast-acting anti-depressant without its harmful side-effects, according to scientists. Ketamine, which was banned in the UK in 2006 and made a class B drug in 2014, was initially used as a horse tranquiliser by vets but has latterly become better known for its use by clubbers and to facilitate date-rape.
Australian governments are deliberately contributing to the deaths, suicide, homelessness, domestic violence and mental illness of Australian Defence Veterans — both young and old.
These sustained and bureaucratically controlled ‘Wattle on Green’ attacks are as treacherous to Diggers on home turf, as the infamous ‘Green on Blue’ attacks on Coalition forces in the Middle and Wider East.
Time and again, in rapid fire betrayal, pensioner veterans have been promised paltry pension increases and time and again in our name, they have been publicly humiliated and their begging bowls filled with soiled matter and rotting promissory notes.
We might as well bury alive our returned service personnel.
Wednesday morning’s gut-wrenching report by Ashley Hall on the ABC’s AM program is a shameful indictment on how Australia treats its returned soldiers with blatant contempt.
It makes a mockery of the political expediency and duplicitous hollow words of successive political leaders who deliver sonorous and patriotic eulogies on the likes of ANZAC Day, during Turkish dawns and over the flag-draped coffins of those killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, whilst basking in the stolen heroic glories of those who lay down their lives for this country in squalid wars mounted upon squalid lies.
He said a lot of parallels could be drawn with Vietnam:
…There’s a lot of parallels we can draw here with the Vietnam generation because everyone in Australia knows what happened to Vietnam veterans.
If you look at mental health, suicide and alcoholism – including in their families – well we’re seeing that play out again in my generation.
We must not capitulate to the will of successive governments and ignore our older veterans in favour of younger veterans.
Both groups must be treated as the first among equals.
Just as there is no space for a generation gap amongst the dead, none must be allowed amongst the living.
I urge everyone to stand shoulder to shoulder on this.
Post-traumatic stress is an insidious and parasitic worm that can, if left unchecked, entirely consume the body, mind and soul of its host.
Because some of our diggers are older, does not mean that their illnesses and horrible predicaments are less real or less worthy than those of younger diggers.
It is clear that successive governments are holding off on compensating older diggers in the hope they will die off and thus avoid any payouts of illnesses contracted through exposure to Agent Orange and other poisonous toxins — as well as giving them fair and honourable increases in their pensions.
On next week’s second Tuesday in the month, long after the hooves of The Melbourne Cup are stilled, some permanently, millions around the nation will again hold their breath on Remembrance Day and observe a minute’s silence on the 11th day of the 11th month to acknowledge the 96th Anniversary of the Armistice of the First World War as well as the sacrifice made by the dead, the living and the living dead who walk amongst us, in all wars and conflicts.
For several years, Independent Australia has campaigned and written about the shameful plight of our veterans.
“It is a strange way to reward ADF members for their dedication and hard work especially as the Government has just dispatched a new contingent to the ongoing Middle East conflicts.”
It is time that DFWA Patron, His Excellency General, the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove AK MC (Retd), now Governor General, did what he should have done when he was chief of the Army and when he was chief of the Defence Force — publicly recommend that Australia’s returning defence personnel be accorded pensions worthy of their sacrifice and commitment.
There is fresh blood on the yellow wattle, spilling onto the green of our national colours and national returned veterans.
From wounds and heartbreak caused by successive and callous home-grown Australian governments, whose continuing war against our veterans is such that they are taking no prisoners; dead or alive.
The dispiriting news feels like it’s coming in a torrent. Canada suffers two terrorist attacks in a week. Another attack in New York, this one with an axe, wounds two police officers before the attacker is shot dead. Immediately you recall the Melbourne case of Abdul Numan Haider, whose weapon of choice was a knife, but whose story had the same ending. Meanwhile, a Sydney teenager plays a starring role in two ISIL propaganda videos in a fortnight, while the man who apparently groomed and recruited him, Mohammad Ali Baryalei, is now very likely dead. This, you might feel, is encouraging until you consider that his symbolic pull is likely only to increase as a result of his “martyrdom”.
But pause for a moment and you notice something about this picture. We’re a long way from all the talk of dirty bombs and nuclear weapons of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era. We’re nowhere near planes smashing into skyscrapers. We’re not even in the neighborhood of bombs being detonated on buses and underground trains, or in nightclubs. This stuff is galling and tragic. It occasions the same public grieving and ceremony, but we’re talking about something qualitatively different, here.
For the moment at least, mass-casualty terrorism is off the agenda. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run over him with your car,” urged ISIL last month as it called upon Muslims to kill random Westerners. There’s a kind of desperate crudeness, here: one that seems to have lowered its horizons. Today it’s about low-casualty, mass-impact terrorism. But that impact is far more psychological than it is material.
The point is not to dismiss this as trivial. It’s serious, not least because it’s clear that a few people have acted on ISIL’s instructions. It’s serious because, while mass-casualty attacks are clearly more devastating, they’re also much harder to pull off. Rather, the point is to note that something has changed. Terrorism is evolving. And so are the terrorists.
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You see, they’re dickheads now. David Leyonhjelm’s description is a disarming one because it recasts these people as self-aggrandizing amateurs. There’s more than an element of truth to this. Zale Thompson’s axe-wielding attack in New York lasted a mere seven seconds before he was shot. He was, by all accounts, an unemployed loner with a record of multiple arrests.
In Canada, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was living in a homeless shelter before he decided to open fire on the Parliament Building. This was a man with a crack cocaine habit, a suite of drug possession and theft episodes, and a history of mental illness. In this respect his story isn’t so far from Baryalei’s, which has more to do with cocaine, gambling and Kings Cross strip clubs than it does with advanced explosives training and a piercing political manifesto. He, too, has a history of mental illness, much like Khaled Sharrouf, who so infamously tweeted a picture of his son holding a severed head, and who was also diagnosed with schizophrenia.
This isn’t the way terrorism has tended to work. For all our knee-jerk descriptions of terrorists as mad, psychopathic or otherwise psychologically disturbed, decades of research has now demonstrated the opposite: that despite their clearly abnormal behavior, terrorists are overwhelmingly sane and psychologically normal. Nor have they tended to be antisocial loners. Terrorism has almost always been a group activity, carried out in cells that have strong bonds of solidarity between members. Certainly there have been “lone wolves” in history – some of them, such as the Unabomber, suffering from mental illness – but these have been exceptions to a well established rule.
But ISIL is playing by different rules. Its reach amongst Westerners is clearly skewed towards converts and born-again Muslims, often with troubled pasts. It tends not to appeal as much to those with long-held, well established religious commitments. That’s because ISIL isn’t merely offering an ideology. Like all fundamentalisms, it’s offering an identity: a chance for people to re-imagine themselves and restart their lives by turning their back in the most radical fashion on everything they’ve left behind. What better way to prove you’re free from the yoke of sin and drugs and sleaze than quite literally to take up arms against them? It’s not just the violence. It’s the illusion of purity and self-sacrifice that goes with it that is attractive.
This is particularly potent in an online era. It is precisely the fact that ISIL is so devastatingly effective online that means it doesn’t have to rely on the kind of group solidarity that has typically held terrorism together. This opens terrorism to people who previously would have been a liability. Someone who is mentally unstable or struggles to work with others is wholly unsuited to the kind of careful, secret planning that is so fundamental to professional terrorism. But no such concern applies when you’re trying to unleash the kind of rudimentary, randomized mayhem ISIL is. Suddenly the lone wolf, which was once an odd curiosity, is an emerging trend that sits near the top of the list of every Western security agency’s worries.
Those agencies will respond with what they know: increased hard power. It’s why we’re so attracted to more counter terrorism laws and military intervention. We have this intuitive understanding that these things work. And sometimes, in the short term, they do.
But at some point we’ll have to recognise that even as we chalk up successes like killing senior terrorist figures, the problem only seems to grow. Who’d have thought 10 years ago that we’d be raising the terror threat level to its highest point in our history after Osama bin Laden had been killed?
That happens because we’re dealing with something that is deeply, irrevocably social. Eradicating it therefore becomes as complex as eradicating any social disease. Truth is we’ve never figured out how to solve those. We can’t stop drug use. We can’t stop disaffection. We can’t stop alienation. Not entirely, anyway. And perhaps we can’t eradicate radicalisation, either, at least until the whole ghastly experiment of militant Islamism collapses under the weight of its nihilistic contradictions. But in the meantime, it won’t be crushed by our sledgehammers.
‘I’ll put one on your chin’: Ray Hadley’s threat to Mike Carlton after the former columnist suggested radio jock was a ‘wife beater’ in row over Woolworths’ racist singlets
Ray Hadley threatened to ‘put one on the chin’ of former Fairfax columnist Mike Carlton during his morning segment on Wednesday
The 2GB reporter was responding to Carlton’s earlier tweet in which he alluded to Hadley being a ‘wife beater’
It was posted after Hadley had defended Woolworth’s ‘racist’ singlets featuring an Australian flag with the words ‘if you don’t love it, leave’
Woolworth’s has since apologised and removed the shirt from its store’s
The man who wrote a scathing column of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a Russian newspaper has gone further in an email exchange with the Neil Mitchell program.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey said Mr Abbott “displays a degree of insolence, arrogance and incompetence” and said Russian president Vladimir Putin should “sterilise his hand” after shaking the Australian leader’s hand in a Pravda column.
The Neil Mitchell program conducted the following interview with Bancroft-Hinchey via email, in which he praises MasterChef Australia and recommends Mr Putin should “grab the bastard” in the unlikely scenario Mr Abbott does attempt a shirtfront.
How would the average Russian respond to Tony Abbott saying he would ‘shirtfront’ Vladimir Putin?
Well, any Russian or anyone else for that matter would question whether Abbott made the remark before or after lunch. If he made it before lunch then either he is childish or mentally challenged and if he made it after lunch then he is incompetent.
How would Vladimir Putin react to being ‘shirtfronted’?
I cannot speak for Vladimir Vladimirovich but if I were him, I’d grab the bastard that did it, slam him over my shoulder, place my boot in his face and ask “You were saying…?”
Vladimir Putin is world-renowned for his judo expertise — would he use that on Mr Abbott if he was ‘shirtfronted’?
Well, I cannot speak for President Putin but he certainly has the skills to react adequately to such an act of aggression. I am not saying he would do so, basically because Abbott wouldn’t have the guts anyway. As soon as he saw Putin looking at him he’d triple his laundry bill, suddenly turn white, sit bolt upright and go screaming over to his sister’s house to grab a clean pair of Y fronts.
Could Vladimir Putin being ‘shirtfronted’ cause an international incident?
Well it would be an act of aggression, common assault and would render the perpetrator liable for prosecution as a criminal. Figures…figures…
Do you feel Tony Abbott is unhygienic (more than once you advocate that Mr Putin wash his hands after interacting with Tony Abbott)?
Well who knows? The guy doesn’t seem to have that much going for him at present, now does he?
What does the show ‘Neighbours’ say about the Australian people?
Well Neighbors is a soap which projects what the Australians want others to believe about the way they live. I do have some family and friends in Australia, though I have more in New Zealand, and would not be surprised if the community based approach was spot on.
What does the show ‘Masterchef’ say about Australia?
Well the Australian Masterchef with those three judges, Garry, George and Matt Preston is extremely popular outside Australia and is my favorite TV show. I like it because people are nice to each other, they are pleasant and the judges are careful not to humiliate the guests, always finding something positive to say about their meals or else giving them constructive criticism. This differs greatly with other Masterchef productions which seem to focus on insulting the cooks and making them feel small and inadequate. I seriously hope Australian Masterchef continues for many years to come…it’s also an excellent source of recipes for those of us who like cooking.
Who do you feel was responsible for the downing of MH-17, and do leaders such as Tony Abbott know more than they are letting on?
Actually after Abbott’s remarks in recent days I get the idea the guy has issues and to be honest feel he may need therapy. Maybe he should try Veganism for a while to see if he can calm down a bit. I doubt he has a clue what is going on in Ukraine after his statements. What I said in my article explains the history of the conflict and in any civilized country you wait for the investigation to conclude before spouting off and firing in all directions. I guess the guy might make a competent hands-on Mayor of a small town somewhere but the Head of Government? Jesus, I could do a better job myself.
So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier. Figures published this week show that, while the income of company directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a whole have fallen in real terms over the past year. The bosses earn – sorry, I mean take – 120 times more than the average full-time worker. (In 2000, it was 47 times). And even if competition did make us richer, it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.
The top 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too were assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness. Many of them reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money. (And if they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he wouldn’t get there until he had $1bn in the bank.
For this, we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this, we have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.
Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older people. But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more, we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we have been forced.
Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.
A few months ago we were going to ban Mr Putin from G20. He wasn’t welcome.
But hey, who are we to go around banning people? God, it’s enough work to try and ban any discussion of climate change. After all, this is an economic forum and, as we all know, climate change has nothing to do with economics.
Besides, the G20’ll be a good opportunity for Tony to “shirtfront”Mr Putin.
We know because Mr Abbott told us this:
“I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin..
“I am going to be saying to Mr Putin Australians were murdered.
“There’ll be a lot of tough conversations with Russia and I suspect the conversation I have with Mr Putin will be the toughest conversation of all.”
So what exactly is a “shirtfront”? Well, looking it on the internet could just lead to confusion because the definition given there is:
the breast of a shirt, in particular that of a stiffened evening shirt.
In the AFL, however, it refers to a solid bump to the opposition player which knocks him to the ground, so, if one presumes that one is not talking about the breast of an evening shirt, one presumes that our PM is planning to give Mr Putin a solid bump. Metaphorically speaking, one hopes, as actually physically bumping another leader could lead to all sorts of nasty things being said about Mr Abbott’s lack of political finesse, and his treatment of older people. After all, Mr Putin is in his sixties and while Joe Hockey would tell you that clearly Putin is fit enough to work for another thirty years, the photos of Abbott standing over an older opponent could be used for memes with captions to the effect that Costello lacked the ticker to do this to Howard.
So, a good solid metaphoric bump that knocks Mr Putin to the metaphoric ground, because Mr Abbott will give Mr Putin the toughest conversation of all – that’ll teach the Russian Embassy to remind everyone that Mr Putin does judo, while Mr Abbott rides bikes. And Mr Putin, being a Russian, won’t be used to us plain-speaking Aussies and will be quite shocked to be spoken to in such a rough way because nobody would have ever spoken roughly to Mr Putin during in his time in the KGB.
That is, unless he doesn’t happen to meet up with him, because according to the news report I just heard, there’s been no formal request from Australia for an actual meeting between the two, with Mr Abbott revising his position and now seems to be saying that if he happened to pass Mr Putin in the corridor, he’d go over to him and give him a jolly good talking to about how we didn’t like it when that plane went down and we think you had something to do with it, so you just better get out of the Ukraine right now or else, he’ll tell Peta Credlin and she’s really tough and she’ll come to Queensland and give him a Chinese Burn and she gives really good Chinese Burns that really hurt and all the backbenchers and ministers are afraid of her…
And if that doesn’t work, he’ll tell his mum.
But whatever, calling for Mr Putin to be banned… Well, that’s just juvenile!
Beware people, the word terrorist can be (and is being, read below for an extract of the parliamentary speech made by this right wing nut job) broadly applied to those who oppose the Abbott government. I wonder which Coalition MP will be the first to apply the word terrorist to the Union movement? Watch this space.
George Christensen:
“We will call out their falsehoods and call for the Extremists to be treated the same as anyone else who commits a crime or an act of terrorism.”
“The extremists are the large, well organised, and very well-funded organisations who use fear and blackmail to coerce the government and the public into adopting their extreme political and ideological views.”
“The eco-terrorists butchered the international tourism market, which sources tell me is down 30 per cent as a result of their campaign, not for the sake of the reef but for the sake of their political ideology.”
“They threaten to kill off thousands of more jobs in the resource industry because they don’t like coal, they don’t like capitalism, and they don’t like people working hard to earn a decent living.”
“Today, I put the Extreme Greens on notice,” he said. “North Queensland will not bow down to eco-terrorists. We will not allow them to lie, to smear, to defame, and to break the law for their own political purposes.”
Australian Media Spawned By Andrew Bolt have no compassion
The only place to deal withe the leader of this swarm is Section 18C of the RAD
Bruce Giles AFP Commander said:
“He(Numan Haider hadn’t been monitored for a long time, it was very early days of investigation with this individual”
Totally ignored by these news hounds baying for a headline and grasping at any rumour that might come to their perverted imaginations.
That Numan had been on police radar for months,bullshit. That he planned to behead the two cops crap. That the young man was a full blown terrorist in constant communication with ISIL. In their kafkaesque media storm they have turned this young 18 year old kid with no priors into the devil. Their moronic reporting is doing what extremists want. Fairfax ought to be ashamed Newscorp is on par. Andrew Bolt has spawned print media morons everywhere. The image of Mr Smith in Matrix has morphed into Andrew Boltcame when I picked up this mornings paper.
The only sensible words heard anywhere were those of Gaith Krayem of the Islamic Council of Victoria
“brandishing a flag and making disparaging comments about agencies does not make someone a terrorist”
“Many young men of that age can be brash, angry and immature. None of those things make him a terrorist”
Not one single reporter or commentator many of them with kids of their own gave any creedance that this young man might just have been suffering from a mental illness.
The percentage of people meeting the criteria for diagnosis of a mental illness was highest in younger people, with the prevalence decreasing with age. Twenty-six per cent of 18-24 year olds had experienced a mental disorder, while only 5.9% of people aged 65 years and over had experienced a mental disorder. – See more at:
When for the past few years the papers have been full of the fact that mental illness is is increasingly prevalent amongst young men none of the reporting even gave it consideration. 26% of young men 18-24 no matter their religion suffer from a mental disorder.
This young man had all the markers of a psychotic breakdown which had been building up for some time.
He was extremely stressed because he’d broken up with his girlfriend who was extremely important in his life some months before. A common trigger in the onset of a mental breakdown among young men.
His friends indicated that he’d changed. That he had become withdrawn and really didn’t want to talk.
Neighbuours said he was quite removed just nodded when they passed
He had left the “extremist” group months before which was yet another an indication of his withdrawl
His parents didn’t know what he was doing he wasn’t talking to them another sign of withdrawl.
He was paranoid and angry as he’d only just had a confrontation with police on the 18th of September. Bruce Giles head of the ADF comment above says it clearly that he’d just come on their radar.
He had a strong relationship with god. Not uncommon in mental illness.
He was by and large a normal Aussie kid.
The above are all telling signs of a young man suffering from a mental illness rather than the fanciful idea of being a heroic over idealised terrorist. Gaith Krayem of the Islamic council of Victoria seems to be the only one quoted by the media that is the voice of reason and more-over compassion in the circumstance for everyone involved
Andrew Bolt has kids he should be so lucky as to not have one of his sons come down with a mental illness so crippling that something like this occurs. Any of the other media fuckwits that claim to have half a brain should have considered this possibility. They have certainly gone down in my eyes. Christian,Muslim,Seikh or Buddhist are not immune to the crippling effects of Paranoid Schizophrenia,Schizo-Affective Disorder, Chronic Bi-Polar Episodes, or Devastating Depression which can bring about psychosis.
I’m sure some of the above media dolts suffer or have suffered from a mental disorder at some time in their life. Or that they have experienced the effects of it in others yet none even considered the possibility of it climbing over themselves for the headline. I’m certain Andrew Bolt more than any of you knows what mental illness is …no compassion, blinkered tunnel vision, inflexibility, inability to listen are also symptoms
10 things you should never say to someone with bipolar disorder
Referring to somebody “as bipolar” sort of insinuates that the only thing this person is is an illness .It is more polite to say someone “has bipolar” than “is You wouldn’t say that somebody “is cancer”.
Oh yeah, I’m a bit like that. Feeling fed up is a normal. Clinical depression, however, (whether unipolar or bipolar), is a devil that chews on bones and gorges on souls and should never be underestimated or undermined.
Do you think I might have it? If you are concerned about your own, or somebody else’s mental health, please do go and see your GP.
Are you like Stephen Fry? No he has the illness
So are all bipolar people creative or genius? I don’t think it plays a part in any of these things that I definitely do possess.
Did you ever try to kill yourself? I wouldn’t ask this until you’re 99.9% it won’t make you a dick for asking this.
I feel bad for you
Is it cured? Are you cured? Mental illness cannot be “cured”. It’s pretty much there for life.
Have you taken your medication?This is actually very much a question family and friends of people with bipolar should ask.
I’d love to be able to say my heart doesn’t break a little every time I’m reminded to take my meds, but it does.
Did you see Silver Linings Playbook? Everyone should see this film.
The man who wrote a scathing column of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a Russian newspaper has gone further in an email exchange with the Neil Mitchell program.
olddogthoughts 