I’ll be giving a talk on Tuesday (1pm ADST) to the ANU seminar on health service research and policy. Topic:Mental health and mental fitness in an age of disaster. The Zoom link is https://anu.zoom.us/j/81262299147?pwd=eWRJNDJFSC9JbHh4dDd0a0IvTUFvdz09
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John Quiggin 
Unable to join zoom yet keen to watch.
Any chance of a link to presentations JQ?
“Topic: Mental health and mental fitness in an age of disaster”.
A disaster symptom and cause of culture and self medication feeding into your topic, yet we seem to have amnesia about: alcohol.
Yesterday and today, I am attempting to counsel a relative to seek help as poor mental health since adolencence, family breakdown, alcohol & recreational drugs have now led to a gambling problem. And living in a shed. Just shy of 50. With no service available to assist in a timely manner as, like the recent rains & floods, every mental health, drug, alcohol and counselling service is full and overflowing.
And it looks like said relative will be taking up an ICU bed, again, and sooner and more frequently. See Guardian below.
I have to overcome “A person convinced against their will is of the same opinion still”.
I am not hopeful and will be saying if he is unwilling to seek help, don’t call again. Hard but necessary. For my mental health and fitness.
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Today:
“For the past 12 months, the occupancy of ICU resources attributable to direct alcohol related critical illness is, at times, using up 25% of available resources,” the physician, who did not wish to be named, said.
“That means a quarter of a tertiary teaching hospital ICU bed spaces, ventilators and life supports are being used by patients with alcohol-related illness including alcohol-related trauma and violence, self-poisoning including alcohol ingestion, chronic liver disease, pancreatitis, bleeding, and seizures. This is about 10 times the critical care burden attributable to Covid, on average, over the last three years at the hospital.”
He said other hospitals were also experiencing a similar burden. During the third Covid wave in 2021, a peak of 195 intensive care unit beds in Australia were being used by Covid patients, compared with 38 cases in intensive care beds on 25 October 2022.
“Alcohol-related critical illness is about 10% of ICU beds on average, year in year out, or about 200 ICU beds occupied beds every day,” he said. “Occasionally, it peaks at 25% in a single hospital on a given day, and some places like Alice Springs have a very high amount most days.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/26/alcogenic-society-australian-hospitals-see-steep-rise-in-severe-alcohol-related-disease
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4 minutes.
The Golden Hour.
“How to heal trauma without medication”
Dr. Essam Daod
“Mental health first aid training among pharmacy and other university students and its impact on stigma toward mental illness
Zachary McCormack et al
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“MHFA was effective in decreasing stigmatizing beliefs among pharmacy and non-pharmacy students. These findings support the utilization of teaching methods that emphasize the patient experience and humanize mental illness.”
…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187712971730326X