Category: Journal

This week I submitted a proposal to the The Government Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction 2018

This is a link to the submission: The Therapeutic Village

There is also a petition on OurActionStation that will be delivered to the Government and again to the Inquiry at the end of November 2018

There is a quote from the opening section of the proposal.

The Proposal
The proposal is that Government develops a framework for the establishment of a series of therapeutic villages.

Such villages will support families and individuals who are already receiving a variety of care. The villages complement but do not replace existing services. They can also perform a preventative function.

The therapeutic village concept envisaged in this submission refers to a group of people living in connection with each other (nearby, though not necessarily all in the same housing) with the purpose of mutual well being. This is not the familiar institutional model of residential care, nor the existing ‘wrap-around’ model, which provides services but no community. The village concept is flexible, built around specific patient/client needs, and puts relationships at the heart of therapeutic work. Villages are guided by a professional team with leadership and coordinating functions, that will facilitate village cohesion. The staff will build and maintain relationships with existing services such as medical centres, schools, daycare, regular therapy group providers and many other services. Continuity of relationships will enable ongoing assessment of needs and coordination of services.

Rice on chessboards, lilys in ponds….

http://www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com/rice-and-chessboard.html

Great little post about how exponential growth happens

How we create wealth is also exponential.

Tools build more tools and better techniques lead to better technologies. As we build layer upon layer of capacity we can make more stuff faster and cheaper.

It started by someone making nails and a hammer before they could build a house. Now much of a house comes out of a factory.

So now there is plenty, abundance?

For some much more than others. There is a peculiar flow of wealth to a very few.

Greed?

The main thing is the algorithm.

When stuff is made there is someone who clips the ticket. The ticket clippers then accumulate a little bit that suddenly is like the rice on the 64th square.

One person will own everything.

Obviously something gives. Wars. Redistribution etc. but the algorithm goes on.

So if it takes 200 years to create this amount of inequality what will it look like in five years.

Work it out:

surplus value  = excess of value of product over value of inputs = s

value of inputs = constant capital (c) + variable capital (v) = c + v

total value of product = C’ = (c+v)+s

C’ – C  = s

https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg09.html

The whole field of mental health, therapy, personal and family therapy is like a huge forest. There are the big trees that provide the canopy. Many species of those from very different families. Then layers of stuff that goes right down to the rare fungi and microscopic little weird things that are not even classified. Occasionally some hardy species will find its way to the sunlight above the canopy and bloom.

As part of the ecology of philosophies, methods, theories, schools and breakaway schools there are the regulating bodies, some governmental and some tied in with professional organisations. There are external factors influencing the cycle like in any ecosystem, education systems, insurance systems and political realities. Epidemics are not uncommon and the whole ecosystem is evolving, rapidly, fuelled by waves of things that go viral on the Internet, by marketing strategies and new inventions.

Is it just nature with everything in its own niche, something we can admire as mirroring the complexity of the human psyche? I think Jung said that somewhere.

Or is it a process which, on the one hand, is full of weeds taking us down false pathways towards violence and war or to isolation and continuation of madness and on the other hand there maybe species struggling to to survive that could be part of assisting humanity to survival. Are there some things that are more progressive than others?

The question is a bit like the debate about regulation and the market.

Who Shall Survive?

Wikipedia:

However, in the sixth Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx criticizes the traditional conception of human nature as a species which incarnates itself in each individual, instead arguing that the conception of human nature is formed by the totality of social relations. Thus, the whole of human nature is not understood, as in classical idealist philosophy, as permanent and universal: the species-being is always determined in a specific social and historical formation, with some aspects being biological.

This shows how Marx is not part of the individualism – not surprising as individualism is something that arises most fully in the capitalist era. The roots are there in Christianity and Buddhism. It is with Marx we see a shift in consciousness.

This is part of a current wave of meditation I seem to be going through on human nature. I’ve been stuck by the two essentialisms: Humans are inherently greed or inherently good. Marx’s idea is very freeing… Humans are a product of their social conditions. And it makes sense of his thinking that different classes produce different ideas. Ideas grow out of practice in social conditions.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/communism-and-fascism-the-reason-they-are-so-similar

This is such a flawed way of seeing it – Pinker!

Related:

Moreno – roles create the personality. (Lynette Clayton)

Hendrix – the self is born in relationship.

It also relates to “truth” we find it in the ‘theatre of truth’ – theatre is social. Esp psychodrama.