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social, health, political imagery through the lens of G J Huba PhD © 2012-2021

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I have been living well with dementia for 12 years. Different from the time before dementia was diagnosed.  With a plan of medications, several gifted doctors, behavioral change, and a lot of introspection I think that I was able to enjoy my life and will continue to do so.

I am publishing a series of interrelated blog posts.

Click the mind map to expand its size.

 

Got Dementia? Overview of What You Might Do for Yourself and Others

It is now 12 years since I was diagnosed with having a neurological condition that results in a lot of brain damage and early-onset dementia. In my case it also resulted in the shaking and instability of Parkinson’s disease and what many would confuse with Alzheimer’s disease. In 2012, retired from 35 years of being a California-licensed research psychologist who had most recently worked evaluating more than 200 agencies that were affiliated with hospitals and community organizations and provided services to people were ignored in the larger health care system in the US. Together with my business partner Dr Lisa Melchior, our consulting worked with the patients-clients-staff-administrators programs funded through grants from Federal agencies in 42 states as well as State Departments of health, education, and research, and foundations, corporations, and individual donors.

When I was forced to retire because of my deteriorating health and my concerns that I would make a mistake and misinterpret data being collected in our research on innovative treatments for underserved and stigmatized people, I decided that I would spend my final years trying to develop some techniques assisting underserved people with dementia, their caregivers, and their medical providers to have the highest quality of life possible at their levels of physical and mental disease. As a side note, I cringed every time some well-meaning friend, colleague, or acquaintance suggested that I should develop a “bucket list” of all the places I never traveled to on vacations or in my work. Many thought the 6 million “miles” I had accumulated in my frequent flyer account meant I love to travel nonstop. Rather, 90 percent of the time, I preferred to be at home working on things important to me.

So I focused on developing inexpensive, easy-to-use methods one could use to find the good things in life and enjoy them, support family members and others in caregiving, and let doctors like myself see what it like to be living with dementia. My belief that is that those with dementia are capable of more than watching old TV shows all day, “abusing” their caregivers by because of frustration, and being “drugged” to a point where they lose focus and an ability to make themselves happy, productive, empathic, and content with their lives within a new reality that is confusing and frustrating. I think that some of the simple methods I have developed and expanded in the 999 blog posts before this one, can be used by many, far at times fun to do, do not require the help of others, and very inexpensive (you can do what I do with a pencil and the back of an used envelope.

I am now developing a second web site Huba.com that is much more direct in helping one to learn my techniques, determine if they are useful for them, and perhaps have an enhanced quality of life. Unlike this web site which more historical, scientific, and experimental, the new web site will be very focused on “just doing it” and enjoying the rest of your and not wrecking the lives of others.

I have done a lot of work which has been fun in the past 12 years. Work has also been my hobby my whole life, and most days at least most of the time I was happy.

Here is a summary of some of the major things that have been going on recently. And … the new web site will be fully operational within a few months.

To make the following mind map larger, you can double-click on the picture and it will expand.

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Let me start by saying that we are not in the stage of AFTER the recent pandemic COVID pandemic. Rather, much of the world still needs help to address COVID vaccines and other issues like the poverty that lets a pandemic spread. But some countries — and the US is one — are now at the stage where we can start to evaluate and understand our shortcomings to prepare for the future. At the very least, a careful analysis of the problems in the COVID pandemic needs to be done so that rich and poor nations can benefit in the future. And the richer nations need to stockpile medicines and medical supplies and needs for permanent and temporary hospitals and clinics and the poorer nations. And we also need to analyse how and why UNICEF failed the poorer countries.

Bill Gates — the noted fanboy of getting publicity through plagues and pandemics — always runs to the news outlets and says that his approach of giving some of the money he stole from the world through exploitative business practices to medical experts (of which he is not one in spite of the fact he plays one in the media),

The approach of having medical experts lead the fight on a pandemic has been found to be lacking since a pandemic is much more than a medical event. Medical experts provided excellent services and produced the research that led to successful vaccines are a key part. But much more is needed in order to address a fast-moving pandemic. People need to be informed in ways they understand. Medical and social service workers need to quickly retrained in the special skills needed to identify and treat infections. Resources — money, medical providers, medical supplies, training, the poverty of many that limits access to healthcare, how the medical and social systems efficiently perform in a coordinated way, education to children when they cannot go to school because of the risk to themselves and others of exposure to a virus, and many other forms of service and help — need to be shared between the rich nations and the poor nations. And the sharing of resources cannot always start in the rich nations with services provided in the poorer nations last.

Effective prevention and treatment services needs to be provided in fairer and more useful forms in the next pandemic.

The following mind map lists some of the issues that must be identified and fixed for a proactive fight against infectious diseases. People will need to be far more cooperative than during COVID, the rich who pay for most of the fight on emerging pandemics must not always get in line to be first, drug companies and many other businesses must not be allowed to make exploitive profits, and religion and gender and poverty and race must not affect whether a needed service is provided.

Please expand the mind map by clicking on it.

We are the United States of America. We think we invented democracy while we struggle to exist as a poorly conceived republic riddled with historical entitlements. Our Legislative Branch of government is totally convoluted with a lack of logic, fairness, honesty, and all kinds of other need processes within a functioning government.


 

The COVID pandemic in the USA and globally is not over. It is hidden. And i’t th’t t will be back in its current form or others. Don’t throw away your N95 respirators (masks).

Follow highly credible health and medical experts with decades of experience in infectious diseases to make sure that you are approaching the covid pandemic correctly. Don’t just pick-up the TV remote and assume any old pundit that wants to talk about the covid pandemic knows something. Most governors of US states know little about health issues.

And even if those giving you information about what you should do in the upcoming new stages of the pandemic.

Do you really want the bozos on Fox TV and its ilk to provide information that is incorrect and can put your family and you at high risk for covid?

Click on the image to expand it.

 

Let’s face reality. Very few people will come out of the pandemic enjoying good mental health. And over many years many will recover only partially.

It’s been a difficult time for most of us.

The diagram shows some of the things we have all been exposed to since late 2019. One key central issue is that most of us are not experienced with dealing with these issues. Stay inside your house for two years? Be unable to attend the funeral of a family member? Go to a friend’s house for dinner? Thanksgiving?

As we re-establish healthy lifestyles after the pandemic, it is quite important that shift many of our treatment and public health resources from COVID hospitalization into mental health services.

We have to confront the “U” factors.

 

Using visual thinking methods probably can improve the ability of many individuals to solve various problems efficently and more effectively.

Take a look at the following mind map. Do you think that you would understand these isssues better if I had written out the views in the mind map as 3 pages of dense words?

Click on the mind map to zoom in.

It seems very obvious to me that the 2020 (now 2021) Olympics starting on July 23, 2021 should be a “no starter.”

Covid infection and death rates are again surging as Variant D spreads globally

Holding the Olympics could cost millions of lives. Worth it to you? Not to me.

Click the image to expand it.

 

Some other considerations.

 

Let’s be real. Most of the population of the world is suffering from the psychological consequences of dealing with the huge phenomenon of the covid pandemic. It is conceivable that the pandemic may last for several more years.

See your primary care doctor or a mental health specialist for help with the psychological consequences of living through such a stressing time. Psychotherapy, counseling, peer support groups, and/or psychiatric medications may be able to help you go back to being you.

2020 and 2021 contained huge shocks for everyone on the globe. We are all feeling confused, apprehensive, and out of control. Try to use the available resources in your community.

For emergencies virtually every community has 24/7 mental health and suicide prevention hotlines. Any hospital emergency room can also provide immediate help.

Please use the resources you need.

 

For the last 15 years of my professional career, I coordinated consensus processes to build new local health and social services policies.

It was the best work and most fun I experienced during my career.

I was lucky to work with more than two thousand participants (in aggregate) helping to develop services for drug abuse, mental illness, social isolation, education, child care, medical services, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, and more.

Here is a diagram of what I believe to be key parts of developing consensus public policy.

Click on the mind map to expand it.

Had various government agencies used a model like mine, they would have been able to get a higher percentage of the population agree to be vaccinated.

Get vaccinated. Your risk of getting  Covid-19 is going way up if you are unvaccinated. If you do not have access to vaccine, wear a mask, stay six feet away from others, stay out of crowds, and wash your hands.

Variant Delta (D or the Indian variant also well-established in the UK)  is the most severe of all variants to date, and is becoming the dominant version of Covid-19 in many countries. Many public health professionals predict that within a few months Variant Delta will the dominant strain globally and in the USA, much as it is currently dominant in India and the UK..

If you want to see the most current information about Covid-19, Variant Delta, search with Google or an alternative search engine. As I write this on June 19, 2021, there is a huge amount of news stories available. CNN has had good coverage on Variant Delta.

Current information is that Variant Delta is the most problematic and deadly Covid-19 variant yet.

The World Health Organization is supposed to be collecting donations of money and covid-19 vaccine doses from large-rich countries and distributing them to small-poor countries.

Is the World Health Organization or WHO or ??? doing a good job?

C+ at best.

But they are good at nagging and blaming large-rich countries that are donating medical supplies and vaccine doses and healthcare supplies and food and water and $s.

WHO should be doing a much better job than it has during the past 18 months. They need to stop whining and writing academic papers and get their staff doing the heavy lifting in getting the vaccine doses they are receiving out to where they are needed most.

Click to expand the mind map.

The vaccines work if administered to ALL very soon.

The vaccines are currently available widely only in rich, larger countries.

In poor countries, vaccine access is available only to the rich and politically connected.

Even the largest current donation of vaccines (500 million doses by the USA) is woefully inadequate.

Here’s why. Click the image to expand it.

During the past covid “pandemic” year (March 2020 through May 2021), have you woken  up every day feeling “lost” or “confused” or “depressed” or “anxious” or ” numb” or like something is “wrong” or “inescapable” or with any of hundreds of more negative feelings?

It is my guess that virtually no one has escaped these feelings during the global fight against covid-19 A lot of the feelings originating from situations occurring during the covid pandemic are visible to everyone. News outlets inform us daily that cases of suicide and violence and most major mental illness and drug abuse and murders are at very high levels compared to historical norms. We can often recognize these major interruptions to “normal life” and hopefully many professional services to combat major stress-induced illnesses and condition can be offered.

We probably — as a global community — have a “fighting chance” of protecting and or preventing the outbreaks of mental illness and stress  breakdowns among many because we recognize these conditions as medical ones that are then referred to qualified physicians or social workers or psychologists to handle.

More insidious and of great longevity are issues like continuous rage or feeling numb and defenseless or apathetic or unable too motivate yourself too walk out the door and deal with issues in the larger real world that you could avoid when hiding inside from covid. Your friends and family might see many of these huge, chronic problems are not rising to a level of concern to be considered a medical condition. Most physicians will also have a lot of difficulty in deciding whether it is appropriate to treat these “reconnection” as medical conditions and with pharmaceuticals they will need to repurpose for conditions are less defined and more chronic than many of the psychiatric-psychological problems they traditionally saw.

Diagnostic categories and conditions are going to have to be significantly revised when Americans start to engage with the old reality or refuse to even try to do so.

What is the United States and all of our sister countries in the global community going to be facing? The mind map below starts to summarize what we are all going to be facing as we restart countries in a year or two when vaccines are provided to all.

Click on the mind map to expand it.

XMIND is a mind map app available for all major notebook computers and all major smartphones. You can use the app with the defaults and get good results after a few hours and very good results after a day. There is a free trial period.

I consider this app to be the #1 choice for beginners and intermediate users. Most users of mind maps will find it does a great job and have no need to move up to the two more advanced apps available for expert users.

I also find that XMIND by default produces mind maps that communicate very well with other mind map users.

You can click on the mind map if you want to expand it.

Let me start off saying that there is no official COVID Pandemic Syndrome in either the psychological or psychiatric literature that I and google are aware of.

There is a paper on “COVID Stress Syndrome” that I found while doing a google search after I was starting to upload this post to the Internet. The closely named paper that can be accessed HERE is a different conception than mine but of equal interest and equal importance as my comments.

The general approach I am taking is that the COVID pandemic has elicited a number of psychological reactions (different in inclusion, importance, and intensity for specific individuals) for most.

In other words, my approach is to point out that exposure to the pandemic over a period of a year or more has resulted in many people experiencing the psychological states, symptoms, and conditions shown in the mind map below. From my observation, many of us have and continue to experience these states probably because of extreme exposure over a long period of time to the conditions of the pandemic. As we know from decades of competent scientific research by tens of thousands of well-trained and smart mental health professionals on grief, anxiety, depression, anger and the other states in my diagram, these problems for most will not go away without some types of psychological intervention for most people. Depending upon the psychological problems an individual is experiencing, proven pharmaceutical-medical and/or behavioral-cognitive interventions are available they will need customized mental health services.

It would be very naive to assume that we need to vaccinate the entire world to finally control the spread of the novel coronavirus without also providing psychological-psychiatric services to those who do and will need them. If such services are not offered at minimal (or no) cost globally, hundreds of millions of people may suffer with depression and anxiety and alcoholism and drug abuse and domestic violence and deeply felt anger for the rest of their lives.

Let’s not forget about the COVID Pandemic Syndrome that is happening to most of us to varying degrees. If we don’t solve the psychological problems caused by the pandemic now, many will not fully recover. Mental health and medical interventions should be available to everyone living through the pandemic or its sequelae if we want the global population to recover and not expose the unborn babies and children of our future to these horrible psychological conditions.

Click on the diagram to expand it.

 

In a follow-up post I am going to provide links to a number of relevant and technically sound studies and speculations on the psychological consequences of the coronavirus.

We need a plan and resources, NOW.

Starting on June 1, US schools should be allocated money from the federal government to provide remedial in-class and online summer classes and counseling services at their school or online. The funds allocated should be for student educational services and not for general school overhead such as building improvement or teachers and resources that are not integrally to these special programs. Services should be provided for 24 months from the time that a school district starts special programs.

Our most important resource — our future generations — should receive full educations and not be penalized because a natural disaster occured during their school years.

Students from communities that have traditionally been underserved either intentionally or inadvertently should have priority to participate in the earliest programs. As possible the same programs should be rolled out to all public school districts.

Click the image to expand it.

 

We are incredibly fortunate to have Tony Fauci in charge of scientific efforts to control and eradicate and inform the public about covid-19.

Clip on the image to increase their size

One of the reasons that the USA has had 568,560 people die from covid-19 is that STOOPID politicians posture in front of the television cameras and say incredibly dumb things and frequently misquote data. Of they pick the “experts” they want to listen to by their politics rather than their expertise.. In a democracy like our, you have to let every idiot elected official say what they want to. BUT YOU DO NOT NEED TO BELIEVE IDIOT POLITICIANS. DO BELIEVE CREDIBLE AND HIGHLY SKILLED HEALTH SCIENTISTS LIKE DR. FAUCI.

For entertainment value and to see what Dr. Fauci and other reputable scientists have to deal with from about half of the US Congress and about 40 percent of the US population, all you need to is watch the news or look on YouTube.

 

 

 

As we recover from the COVID pandemic, it is important to recognize that much of the world population has been under severe stress from the pressure of dealing with deaths of loved ones, uncertainty, financial pressures, anxiety, depression, and fear.

The symptoms of psychological crisis in the past 15 months are not going away without professional help.

The following show some of the ways that help needs to be offered. If even 10% of the global population has been affected by psychological stress, we have huge issues to address.

Click the mind map to expand its size.