COVID19, childhood leukaemia and nuclear power plants.

How’s that for a title? It’s literally got it all.

I LOVE a conspiracy theory. Just when I despair at humanity’s thundering lack of imagination, someone joins the dots in a completely new way, and reveals a picture that doesn’t look like a cat at all. It’s like watching the X-Files in real time.

Epidemiology is also about joining the dots in creative ways. And, if you’re not into felting, it’s a serviceable hobby for the middle aged, ‘creative’ thinker. Nowadays, of course, everyone is an armchair epidemiologist, but only when it comes to COVID19. I’ve yet to notice the Twitter shut-ins hold forth on diabetes. YAWN.

Back to conspiracy theories.  Have a look at this town.

Pretty, isn’t it? This is Thurso, in the Thurso-Dounreay region of northern Scotland. It’s a lovely wee spot with good surfing, if you can eat enough shortbread to maintain a thick enough layer of insulation.

Here’s another picture:

This is Dounreay, just along the coast. Dounreay is The Capital of Scottish Ping-Pong.

OK, it’s not. That big round thing is a nuclear reactor.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Dounreay-Thurso’s children started getting sick. More specifically, the region surrounding the power plant had a statistically significant increase in cases of childhood leukaemia;

 Observed numbers of cases of leukaemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and observed to expected ratios with expected numbers based on Scottish national rates were determined. In 1968-91, 12 cases were observed compared with 5.2 expected in the zone < 25 km from the Dounreay plant (p = 0.007). In the latest period, 1985-91, which has not previously been examined, four cases were observed compared with 1.4 expected (p = 0.059). (from here)

Now, if you’re living in the shadow of a nuclear reactor and children start getting sick with leukaemia, it doesn’t take long to cast an eye towards Giant Ping Pong Ball of Doom. Which is, of course, exactly what everyone did.

I’m not going to get into the definition of clusters because that would be exceedingly dull and require another cardigan, but the short version is, you work out an average number of cases per kilometre (or some other metric) and then see if your cluster exceeds what’s expected. And Dounreay did.

Radiation is a bit of a bugger. So much so, that humans have been looking into it for quite some time. In the case of Dounreay, scientists measured the amount of radiation and unequivocally found that it was too low to be causing the cluster of disease. What they did notice, however, was that the region had experienced an influx of workers, which lead them to suspect another culprit;

Population mixing.

Population mixing simply describes the effect of one population with a more robust immunity mixing with another with a more naive immunity. It describes the process where anything from polio to influenza to measles wreaks havoc on a naive community.

Infectious diseases are a dead-set bummer, as 2020 has reminded us with startling alacrity.  Suddenly we’re all feeling a bit less Sex in the City and a bit more Inca.

As we’re all very aware, death is the infectious disease’s primary side effect, but there are other effects too.

It’s long been known that infectious diseases can cause other illnesses, long after the initial illness has passed, like rheumatic fever (which I have personally had the pleasure of experiencing) or the flu and its (still controversial) role in the development of adult onset schizophrenia.

Indeed, everything from diabetes to leukaemia gets the glad-eye from the infectious disease weirdos.

In Dounreay-Thurso, epidemiologists suspected that workers from outside the region were bringing novel infections with them, infections to which the children had little background immunity. It’s long been suspected that infectious disease has a role to play in childhood leukaemia. In 2018 British scientist Professor Mel Greaves released a hypothesis that argued that childhood ALL (the most common type of leukaemia) was likely caused by a combination of genetic predisposition and the timing of novel infections. It looks pretty promising, but then what would I know?

The idea is partly based on the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ – children aren’t exposed to the right kind of viruses and bacteria at the right times.

Which brings me to COVID19. Is COVID19 novel enough for our children’s immune systems to recognise it as a novel pathogen, thus causing an increase in childhood leukaemias in the near future? Or is it close enough to other coronaviruses that children already have some extant immunity?

I’m pretty sure the children of Dounreay-Thurso had some immunity to the kinds of infections that were being introduced into their communities. I mean, northern Scotland is remote, but it’s not Mars.

Conversely, as children are sequestered at home and sanitised like a Woolies chook every time they step outside the door, will this result in an increase of leukaemia, as young children fail to acquire exposure to every day viruses and bacterias? Obviously, in some countries, self-isolation is strongly delineated by class. Will this show up in the years to come?

Will we see a rise in childhood leukaemia as a result of widespread infection with COVID19?

Or, will we see a rise in childhood leukaemia as a result of the precautions we’ve taken against COVID19?

Or is childhood leukaemia simply too rare for these effects to form a signal above the noise?

This is the kind of thing I wonder when I’m lying in bed at night. It may also be why I don’t get invited out to dinner very often.

Melting

For me, the big, terrifying topic du jour is the Arctic melt, currently carrying on apace. When there are temps into the high 30s in the Arctic, it’s perhaps safe to say that COVID is looking pretty minor really.

That said, I’ve been prompted, via my kid, to explain why ‘everyone hates JK Rowling when she’s awesome’. The kid knows what climate change is but she’s absolutely baffled about hate-speech directed at her favourite author.

I think I did a serviceable job of explaining the issue. I rely pretty heavily on scientific explanations for more or less everything, and the kid is familiar with basic biology, so the idea that almost every human is made of cells that are sexed – that is, XY or XX, was pretty straightforward. This is quite essential. 10% of spontaneous abortions, for instance, are due to Turner’s syndrome.  It’s very important to have functioning chromosomes, in the right number and stacked up the right way. Yes, this is a reductionist view, but my kid thinks that humans start at DNA so I crack into things from there. Almost all humans that make it past 24 weeks have ‘sexed’ cells.

I was looking for intersex examples where ‘chromosomally’ males present as females, and of course, found the world of athletics useful. Caster Semenya in particular, because so much has been written about her. I explained that biologically she has male chromosomes and ambiguous genitalia. This explains why her body looks mostly but not entirely male.

Caster Semenya considers herself a woman and should be considered thus. That’s not biology, that’s just basic respect.

It’s distasteful that we have worldwide conversations about a person’s genitals but I’m old enough to remember this happening before – with East German olympic athletes. I’ll come back to that.

In the course of reading about athletics, I found this article, in The Conversation, which I read as one side of the debate – supporting Semenya’s inclusion in women’s sport. Here, the author explains how women’s sport could be changed to fairly include women like Caster Semenya.

And this, I realise, is a perfect example of why people are getting rather upset about JK Rowling.

This article makes the statement that women should be allowed to take performance enhancing testosterone to bring them closer to their XY competitors, and make up for the other biological differences that being XY gives to an athlete (muscle development and mass, etc.,.). The article states it would not entirely level the playing field (“reduce the advantage”), as more than just testosterone dictates body development, but it would enable these women to possibly perform a little more like men, and therefore be closer to their intersex or XY competitors.

To be clear, this article says that women should ‘dope’ so that their sports category, women, can include XY women.

There is no discussion of any negative health consequences for this doping.

Sanctioning athletes taking performance enhancing, sex altering drugs that will damage their life long health has been done before, in East Germany in the 1970s and 80s.

And this is why it’s such a good teaching example.

In this case, XX women must change to accomodate XY women if they want to participate in elite sport. They may damage their bodies to do so. Is this fair?

Well, consider this; Up until this point, it’s been the case that XY women must change and potentially damage their bodies to meet the requirements of XX women. Is this fair?

Neither situation is fair. There is no situation where both groups’ needs are met. Both ‘solutions’ require one group to alter their body in potentially damaging ways. This is because in sport, unlike almost every other facet of life, one’s biology and physical capacity is the arbitrating factor.

So who will win?  she asked.

Well, that’s what the fuss is all about.

 

 

Getting real on university funding shortfalls.

The cost of Humanities/Arts degrees is set to double at Australian universities, while halving for STEM and medical courses.

Apparently, this is due to a huge increase in enrolments following the COVID shutdowns. Dan Tehan has claimed that changes will encourage new students into more ‘work ready’ degrees, in STEM and healthcare, in particular.

The rationale is to curb spiralling enrolments, especially in courses that don’t lead directly to a job. There’s a difference however, between reality and what we might charitably deem bullshit.

Sure, sending a price signal sounds like a good way to contain costs, and price signals are baked in to government policy. It simply assumes that rising the price will curb the demand. What the government is not saying is that the demand also reflects potential students’ opportunity costs of NOT enrolling in a degree.

In the current COVID recession, if you’re a young person with a fairly average high school education, your choices are either university or casual work/dole.

Let’s be clear, despite the focus on school leavers’ choices in the media, the main increase in enrolments will come from young people who’re over 25. These are people who’ve been casually employed, often underemployed, and are now unemployed.

Over 25s are eligible for Austudy, and, compared the alternatives, this looks like a good option. The dole, on the other hand, comes with social stigma and punitive conditions. Yes, students will pay for their degrees with a HECS debt but the repayment threshold is 45k. For many young people, earning this much money, in a casualised underemployment market, is so far away it’s almost irrelevant.

It’s worth mentioning the silliness of the debate around humanities degrees too: I giggled at Julia Baird stating that most Arts/Humanities student do in fact get a job. That’s nice, but Baird makes no comment as to whether this is related to their degree. Without that, her statement is meaningless. Most Australian adults will get a job, whether they attend university or not. Youth unemployment is high, so perhaps what we should be asking is; do Arts/Humanities students get jobs when they leave university simply because they’re three or four years older than they started? This is a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Now, back to the COVID recession. If you’re under 35 and newly unemployed, university study looks good. Sure you could go to TAFE, if you can find one that’s open and offers something sensible, but TAFE is now non-existent for many young people – it’s so hollowed out, and many of the courses so irrelevant that only the most essential, regulated and dictatorial courses remain viable (for instance, nursing, which can also be done at university).

Many young people will, therefore, enrol at university. And without a good high school education, the humanities, nursing or social work are basically the only doors open to them.

Let’s be clear about one thing, there has been a huge increase in university enrolments but it’s not a new thing. In 1989, 7.9% of Australians held an undergraduate degree. By 2018, that proportion had increased to 27.3%.

As you can see though, most of this increase comes from medicine and nursing.

Enrolment in the humanities has steadily declined, as a proportion of all fields, since 1989. So has everything else, at the ‘expense’ of medicine and nursing (which is in part due to nursing becoming a degree).

So, I would expect that there will, in fact, be an increase in enrolments in the humanities, as it will pick up newly unemployed students who otherwise would not have gone to university and who are not be eligible for other courses. However, the increase will be small, as the popularity of these courses is generally declining.

So, the government’s intimation that university enrolments are spiralling upwards and we’re in danger of being overrun with Gender Studies grads is, therefore, bullshit. The plan to double the cost of humanities degrees is not justified on these grounds. And, as Mr Tehan well knows, doubling the price will will not curb enrolments.

Perhaps the only real economic justification for cracking down on humanities courses is that they’re predominantly taken by women, who take longer to reach the HECS repayment threshold of 45k.

You can see here though that the difference is not huge.

Which brings us to the real reason they’re knocking the humanities – the culture wars. Tehan and his ilk have simply been watching too much crappy television. They’re convinced we’re on the cusp of a ‘cultural Maxist’ tea party. Or something. I can never really keep up with their paranoid, garbled ramblings about this stuff.

I should say that increasing the number of humanities students is not an intrinsically good or bad thing, in my view.  After all, I’d rather live in a society with degree educated people than not. Many of the civil liberties we enjoy today are the direct result of social and political awareness and advocacy, gleaned from and through a university education. I personally think university should be free. Certainly there’s a good economic case for it, as well as a ‘Australia is a nice place to live’ case.

Obviously, though, no government wants to pay people to ably criticise it.

 

How to female.

When I first started uni my wildcard course was Anthropology. I loved it. The lecturer was brilliant, a very terse Brit with a Gatling gun delivery style.

One sunny afternoon I was helping my Mum lift some heavy things for the church fete and saw my lecturer slope across the driveway.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked Mumsy, who told me that my lecturer was a member of the Presbyterian church.

I was stunned. Why on earth would a man who’d peered beneath the curtain of humanity’s Stupid Beliefs willingly adhere to one himself?

I still had, in my mind, a very modern approach to social sciences – that is, I thought they were actually ‘a science’. Watching Dr Gatling unloading boxes onto the church’s cold front porch was like watching an epidemiologist tipping lavender oil into a vial of polio vaccine.

Of course, Mr Gatling knew something I didn’t. As an anthropologist he knew that silly cultural artifice is the defining characteristic of our humanity. He went to church because it was a culturally relevant institution that integrated his personality, his family life and his sense of purpose. It made him knowable, accountable and relevant to himself. Being Presbyterian was part of his identity, and intersected with all the other bits of himself, like being a man, a father, a worker, a socialist and everything else.

Let me tell you another story. Recently I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with young teenagers. ‘Interacting’ might be pushing it, but imagine the kind of shepherding that one might undertake with an algal bloom in a strong tide and you’re getting close.

I like teenagers, the more difficult, the better. And it strikes me that we’ve done something peculiar to the current batch. We’ve told them, their entire lives, that the most important thing in life is to be an individual. Be yourself, screams the television into their cherubic young faces. There is nothing better than being an individual, and what’s more, if you try not to be, you’ll end up UNHAPPY.

Spoiler alert; a lot of them are pretty unhappy.

What we need to tell kids is that culture is important. In fact, there’s very little of ourselves that isn’t mediated through our culture. I’m not saying anything that millions of others haven’t, everyone from Noam Chomsky to Levi Strauss to Jordan Peterson. We, as humans, respond strongly to social roles. We are unmoored without them. It’s bad enough when the roles change because of structural reasons, (think, rust belt unemployment), but when we’re told to abandon them as inauthentic to our true selves, that’s harder still.

I’m realising too, as the gender wars kick into high gear and scores of young teenage girls decide they don’t identify as Pole-Dancing Barbie, and are therefore, obviously, not female, that gender is where much of this comes home to roost.

Gender is socially constructed, and yes, it does have a passing acquaintance with biology. Sex is binary, obviously, Otherwise we would have male/female/slime mould. It is also not a scale. When I say binary, I mean discrete categories. There are humans, of course, whose sex is ambiguous – about 0.018% of the humans. This alone is used to determine a ‘spectrum’ model of gender that we tell our children is based in biology, but isn’t.

Gender, on the other hand, is social and malleable. This is of course completely straightforward. And it stands to complete reason that in all of humanity there will be humans who do not feel that they are living ‘in the right body’. These humans must have the same human rights as everyone else. Currently, they do not, and are subjected to the kinds of violence that women have been familiar with for generations.

What we should not do is conflate biology with gender, but that’s exactly what we tell our kids.

It’s scruffy, because kids are being told that that biology is determinative and a big confusing mess that they can make sense of themselves. I think what I would like to say is that we’ve told young people that they should know how to be gendered young people on their own terms, without any cultural reference point. It’s like handing them the fabric and telling them to make a pair of pants, with no pattern, no advice, other than just, ‘Whatever YOU think they should look like, it’ll be GREAT because YOU’RE AWESOME”

Even the ebullient language is enough to bring on a crippling bout of depression.

All other social animals watch their family and community for cues about how to behave. Expecting humans to be so drastically different is both astonishingly arrogant and foolish.

I say this as a parent. I never, ever thought that I would engage in any kind of feminine silliness. I inwardly judged mothers who claimed that their girls were just girly because that’s how they came, fresh out of the box. I am not girly and have lived a very masculine life, but that’s largely because there was little time for anything else. My culture dictated that I be useful, and in the absence of any other option, that meant being able to drop a Salisbury diff out in an afternoon.

I’ve thought a lot about the type of femininity I model for my daughter. And as she gets older, I’m embracing and encouraging her in ‘things girly’. Partly, this is as a way to fit in, and partly, it’s a way to let her know that her femininity can be her own thing. But mainly, it’s because there is value in sociality, it’s what makes us human, and smart people, like my anthropology lecturer, know full well that resistance is futile.

 

Architecture; Framing the View, Richard Leplastrier Documentary

I watched this last night; Framing the View, the documentary on Australian architect, Richard Leplasterier.

It was good, and there’s no doubt that Leplasterier designs beautiful buildings. But I think the documentary, filmed over 15 years, illustrated the tensions between romance and pragmatism.

Leplasterier’s family home, on a south facing slope in Lovett Bay, overlooking the harbour on the other side of the stratospherically ostentatious Palm beach peninsula in Sydney, is described as ‘bringing nature in’. His designs were undeniably ground breaking in Australian architecture in the 1970s. Simply, he brought an Asian inspired, nature oriented design to what was still a pretty straight-laced colonial outpost.

Years ago I had the pleasure of working with a young architecture student who’d gone to the islands to ‘learn from the locals’ about sustainable buildings, built in harmony with the environment. What he realised, after the vim of colonial obsequiousness wore off, was that the locals kept asking if he could build them a concrete bunker. It turns out that if there is a cultural universal, it’s that people around the world hate having their food stores nibbled at by animals while being eaten alive by mosquitos. The ‘noble savage’ wants a good night’s sleep like everyone else.

I reflected on this as Leplasterier held forth on the the family as the absolute pinnacle of the home – that the house should honour and be in service to the family. As I watched his wife trudging across a muddy track to a storage hut to gather food and utensils for cooking dinner in the outside kitchen, tersely instructing her children what to carry while the head-torch slipped down her forehead, I thought how honoured they all looked. In fact, nature was honouring them with its inimitable incursions into their lives on a moment by moment basis. Like many who’ve spent time in the countries that so inspired Leplasterier, I pondered the asymmetries of work involved in keeping house and home together. It is women who often carry the lion-share of this burden.

Leplasterier’s architecture is perhaps an example of groundbreaking innovation and ossified sexism. The Japanese architecture he so loved is undeniably beautiful but his account of his time in Tokyo is telling – he worked and studied with men. Architecture was designed for the lofty goals of art, show, philosophy, extension of the mind. It was not pragmatic, because the actual gris of getting husband and children fed, wiped and entertained was not men’s business. Leplasterier had the freedom to be honoured by nature because his wife honoured him with the labour for him to enjoy it.

By the 1970s when Leplastrier was really getting cracking, Australian architecture was democratising. Houses with huge entertaining spaces and tiny galley kitchens were gone in favour of open plan, kitchen-centred designs. Women still did most of the cooking, but they would no longer be hidden away while doing it. Women, as has always been the case, are at the heart of the family, but Australian architecture started to reflect that. The fact that there were architects working in the 1960s and 70 who were in fact embracing and honouring women through design is a lovely thing.

Perhaps if there is one thing about Australian architecture that really sets it apart from other, older traditions, it’s its ability to embrace pragmatic, landscape inspired design that reflects more egalitarian attitudes to men, women and children.

I love Leplastrier’s work and ethos for its beauty and reverence of nature, but I’d get him to design me a boat.

 

International education; selling residency

Why isn’t the government supporting the tertiary sector? It is, after all, our fourth biggest export earner. Except it isn’t. Unless you consider residency a ‘product’.

International students come to Australia because university places are one way of purchasing permanent residency.

In order to get permanent residency you have to meet the 2 year ‘Australian Study Requirement’ – 2 years living in Australia. You then choose a job from the ‘skilled occupation list‘. Often this job does not relate to whatever you obtained your Australian qualification in.

You get points for studying in Australia, for sure. But an undergrad degree takes you three or more years and does not get you many points. A post grad, MA or PhD gets you heaps more points (I think about 20).

And, as a bonus, most MA programs are conveniently 2 years, so you meet the residency requirements.

There is, therefore, pressure on unis to ‘develop’ and provide MA courses that are 2 years in length and targeted at international students. Often these are called ‘international student products’

Below is a course I have chosen from a university at random, the University of Wollongong. There are many courses like this, at many Australian universities (but this one was easy to find because it’s got ‘international’ bunged on the end of it. I like their honest approach).

This course, called the Masters of Nursing International, is, like the name suggests, aimed at international students. Domestic students cannot enrol in it (according to the website).

You might assume that graduates of the  ‘Australian Study Requirement’ (two years at an Australian university) would use their qualification towards their ‘Skilled Occupation’ for permanent residency.

For instance, if you obtained a MA of Nursing International, you would apply for work within the Australian healthcare system that recognises your MA of nursing.

You’d be wrong. I enquired.

The MA of Nursing International is not recognised in the Australian healthcare setting. If you want a Masters of Nursing that’s recognised in the Australian healthcare system, you need to do a different course, called….wait for it…..

Masters of Nursing.

To be clear, there are TWO courses. One is a MA of Nursing for international students that happens to be two years long, and another MA of Nursing for domestic students that is a professional qualification. Only one of these is recognised as a Masters of Nursing in Australia and designed to get graduates a relevant job.

So what qualifications are required to enter the MA of Nursing International?

“International students with a recognised Bachelor degree in Nursing can accelerate their career progression by undertaking the Master of Nursing International at UOW.”

So, you need to be a qualified nurse, and have your qualification recognised in Australia. But, if you’re a qualified nurse looking to move to Australia, why wouldn’t you just apply for a skilled worker visa? After all, nursing is ‘on the list’.

Could it be that the University will recognise your Indian nursing degree as a prerequisite for entering the Masters of Nursing International, but the Australian government won’t recognise your Indian nursing degree to work in a hospital?

So, you want to come to Australia. But, you don’t have a relevant qualification, and you can’t speak English.

You need an agent.

All universities have agents. I have known one for a long time.

Agents work in source countries, selling education ‘products’. Can’t speak English at an IELTS score higher than 5? Don’t worry, for this small fee (paid for by the university) we can ‘help’ you to pass the requirements.

Don’t have a nursing degree? Don’t worry, for a small fee (paid for by the university) we can find an equivalent.

So, you’re all set! All you need now is the 60k to pay the fees. And this is where things get pretty ugly.

Let’s be clear, a two year student visa (which can be extended for one extra year) enables a student and their immediate family to move to Australia for two years. Let’s imagine a young woman moves to Australia, with her husband. One or both of them, or their families, have borrowed 60k for the fees.

The couple move to Australia and try to find work to pay off the loan. Officially, full time students cannot work more than a few hours a week, so they’re forced to work illegally for lower wages.

Again, the universities are aware of and support this model, primarily through the lack of the requirement to actually attend university.  Here’s the Masters of Nursing International, again;

“The course is delivered via weekly online learning activities in each subject over the course of each semester. It also features intensive face-to-face workshops, which are delivered on-campus each semester.” 

The courses are almost entirely delivered online. This means that students can come to Australia, be ‘enrolled’ in an online course, work many, many hours washing dishes, make money to send home and turn up to a ‘workshop’ a couple of times a year. Who completes their work? As with all online course, the work is completed by the student or whomever is paid to complete it. Not surprisingly, for this course there’s no ‘clinical placement’ component. 

It’s not hard to see how women, especially, are placed in an extremely vulnerable position. There’s literally no way out of this scenario. They can’t just ‘go home’ – their family has taken on an enormous debt to pay for the ‘education’. Tragically, this has predictable results, where women are often subjected to abuse or even murder.

The MA of nursing, by the way, looks great on paper – really thorough. And students DO complete a course of study. But it’s pretty basic.

 The real aim of the course is to gain points for a residency application.

Now, let’s be clear about a couple of things. There are international students in Australia who’re here for the education. These are usually STEM students but there are others. However, some at universities up to 40% of their student their student body is comprised of international students. Are they all here because of the ‘prestige education?’

So why does this system exist?

It exists because Australia’s growth is predicated on immigration. This can be easily seen by comparing the GDP to GDP per capita figures. But why not just open the doors?

Well, Australia wants to extract as much money out of incoming immigrants as possible and limit supply. Yes these people are young and healthy, and they smooth out our ageing demographic. But if we can charge them for residency, why not?

Furthermore, the universities themselves have increasingly supplemented their shrinking government revenue with international students’ fees. International students basically pay for domestic students to attend university. Importantly, they pay for an awful lot of young Australians to get a high school education

 Universities are increasing the number of ‘bums on seats’. This is also why the level of education has declined so dramatically in general arts courses – it’s in the universities’ interests. As the value of an undergraduate degree has declined, the only way to distinguish oneself as having a decent education is to get a post grad degree – more bums, more seats.

So, why isn’t the government bailing out universities? Because universities have tipped the balance.

The essential education ‘bit’ will roll on – domestic students will still enrol for engineering, law, science and medical degrees. The rest of it (what Americans might call, liberal arts) is paid for by international students. And they’re not coming.

In other words, the government has currently embargoed the sale of Australian permanent residency and its lack of support for the tertiary sector lays bare the truth of this arrangement.

This is not one of those, ‘in my day, university standards were much higher and young people today should all be fed through the woodchipper’ etc.,. posts. Universities provide excellent teaching and excellent learning opportunities. Staff work exceptionally hard. It’s also in no way suggesting that the non professional faculties (history etc.,.) are pointless. In fact, that’s the second reason they’re left out of funding arrangements – no government wants its citizens to have an excellent critical understanding of how power operates.

That said, we cannot overlook the simple join-the-dots above. Universities are unwillingly complicit in an economic arrangement that creates vulnerable situations, driven by economic factors, and tied into Australia’s economic growth.

Mental health and other fables

I drive a lot. And when I drive I listen to podcasts. I’ve been listening to ABC’s The Health Report for a very long time. It’s always good, and often covers things that I wouldn’t encounter elsewhere.

Yesterday as I drove through the gathering dusk of a rainy Tuesday evening, I heard Norman Swan interview a woman called Christine Morgan. 

Christine Morgan has found herself, quite willingly, at the intersection of a multi-faceted political shit-storm. Bushfires and now Covid-19 are, quite predictably wreaking economic havoc on regional communities, many of which are already the poorest areas in Australia.

Quite naturally, the usual cabal of self interest carpet baggers have rolled up with their grab-bag of expected demands – MORE FUNDING FOR MENTAL HEALTH. Apparently we’re on the precipice of a suicide crisis.

Public health funding for interventions is so hard to come by, and usually requires robust proof of efficacy. In mental health though, evidence is often optional.

And yet, in light of no evidence of efficacy, the government announced 19 million dollars for some kind of regional mental health thingo. I say that, because, under sustained, direct questioning from Norman Swan, a medical practitioner who, no doubt, is acutely aware of the punishing requirements of funding, Ms Morgan could not tell him what the plan would actually do.

Morgan emitted some garbled fuck-speak about connectedness and resilience and intersectional community based oriented interpersonal directed tailored appropriate interventions. 

‘Social determinants’ got wedged in there, but as an afterthought.

She was pressed again, and again, spent five minutes wittering on about the same key jargon terms above.

Swan was magnanimous in defeat.

I live in post-bushfire regional Australia. It’s obvious that the mental health that Morgan is talking about is actually social ‘health’ – insecure housing, no money and poor physical health. 

Solving that problem is very expensive. So instead, people like Morgan label people mentally unwell, eagerly ‘treated’ by an ever increasing number of graduating psychologists who talk about ‘connectedness’. Connected to what? A job? Enough money to live on? A course of ivermectin for scabies so everyone can get some sleep? A trip to the dentist to treat an abscess?

No. It connects them to a psychologist. Economists call this ‘supply side market manipulation’. If you ask a psychologist if you need government funded psychological help, what are they going to say? No thanks, we hate money?

Every morning I take my dog to the beach, early. We park in the carpark and walk the track to the beach. About a month after the fires I pulled up and saw a guy getting out of his car, with some difficulty. His leg was in a full cast, up to the thigh. He managed to manoevre himself out of the car, across the carpark and down to the toilet block. He was sleeping in his car, with a broken leg.

I saw him most mornings for about a month. Then there was another guy with a clapped out green Hyundai. He usually put the bonnet up during the day so people wouldn’t call the Council. Then there was another guy in an old Mazda Astina. He gave me a fright, because his face was pressed up against the window as he slept. In the dim dawn light he looked as if he was dead.

These are the ‘traumatised people’ that these mental health practitioners are ‘helping’. They meet with them in a warm office and offer them instant coffee and biscuits. They make suggestions and ‘develop strategies’. They ‘put them in touch with local services’ – as Christine Morgan outlined for us. These local services are organisations like Campbell Page, a company that exists to operationalise the punitive end of the Centrelink system.

Does this assist their mental health? Of course it doesn’t.

So how is it that people like Christine Morgan manage to extract literally millions of dollars out of the public purse to employ an ever increasing cohort of graduate psychologists? Who wins?

Well, obviously the psychologists. After all, this is corporate welfare, no different than the ‘Employment Agencies’ who also happen to be generous donors to the Liberal Party.

The big winner though is the government.

Convincing people their problems are caused by mental illness, rather than social inequality individualises the blame & undermines their sense of personal strength. It tells them, ‘Your misery is your fault. It’s because you’re mentally unwell’. It enfeebles and depoliticises them. In individualises them and makes them feel like they’re unusual.

‘Mental health’ is an effective strategy for defusing real social change. 

And who are the losers in this game? Well, obviously those who’re suffering from real social disadvantage, those who could do with secure tenure in a rental property and a trip to the dentist.

But there’s another set of losers, those with real mental health issues. We never hear about these people until it all goes wrong – the young man who murdered Eurydice Dixon in Melbourne, for instance.

Reallocating finding into ‘lifestyle’ mental health instead of ‘real’ mental health services for people who have illnesses like schizophrenia and bi-polar is bloody criminal. And yet these are the people who’re least able to advocate for themselves. Psychologists won’t advocate for them because these people actually need real help, and that’s not something they’re in the business of providing. Once again, it falls upon real medical professionals to try to secure funding for a pressing and serious group of illnesses.

The mental health gravy train is also an artefact of middle class, professional psychologists, who’ve seldom experienced real, grinding poverty. For them, it’s inconceivable that a person might find their circumstances so bleak that they would consider suicide as an ‘out’. For these psychologists, suicide is, by definition, a mental health issue.

It’s not.

We could halve the suicide rate in Australia in six months. We would ensure people’s social health. We would give them secure housing, healthcare, dentistry, access to work, education, good food. We could stop denigrating and humiliating them through the Centrelink/workfare model. We could address homelessness. Some suicides are undoubtedly caused by very real mental health problems, but most are caused by social problems. This is indisputable and reflected in the real rise of suicides with every economic reversal.

We should stop lining the pockets of career carpet-baggers whose mandate is little more than;

– Convince this person they’re mentally unwell so they don’t feel like they can organise collectively against the conditions they find themselves in

– Potentially help them adjust emotionally to being homeless and completely without hope of an improvement in their circumstances.

This new government initiative is meant to be rolled out to address ‘poor mental health’ in regional Australia. It’s insulting. Imagine you lose your job and your home in the pandemic shutdowns.

Is the nice lady with the dangley earrings going to buy you a new house? Or even help you find and pay for a rental? Nope.

But she can try to make you feel happier about being at the pointy end of nature’s climate change catastrophe, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a couple of Wagon Wheels.