power

PART I: “There were always ample warnings. There were always subtle signs.”

March 19, 2018 — leslie dean brown

Illustration by leslie dean brown. © 2018. All rights reserved.

I had an appointment with a mental health worker the day before my admission to the psych ward.

The reason I was there in the first place was that I had asked my GP about it. I wanted more frequent visits with a mental health professional. A counsellor or something. Someone like Deanna Troi. Someone nice that I could talk to about my innermost feelings. Because it helps to get things off your chest. It helps to talk.

They say you shouldn’t let your skeletons out of the closet. Suicide is still a very taboo subject, so I thought long and hard about posting this. In the end, I decided to hit ‘publish’.

But I also wanted to speak with a psychiatrist directly in order to check up on my medication. Because they are the experts and I didn’t think Cymbalta was working properly. So I had asked my GP to see a psychiatrist. She in turn had offered to provide a referral, I had said “I would like that very much” and she obliged. Good. Finally I was getting somewhere.

I called them to make the appointment. I thought I would get to speak with a psychiatrist straight away. I don’t know if the person I spoke to first was a community health worker or an occupational therapist. She told me “it doesn’t work that way”, that “there’s a screening process”. I would get to see her three times first, and if approved, only then I would get to see a psychiatrist. This was the first visit.

After 45 minutes of answering questions, I still didn’t know if I qualified or not. Apparently psychiatrists are in short supply in regional areas (they even fly in from Sydney to do mental health assessments and then fly out a few hours later). Interesting.

They asked me whether I had any suicidal thoughts and I said yes. Why lie?

Previously I only ever had fleeting thoughts which is fairly normal I think. Personally I consider suicide the last and least desirable option. But it still is an option and it should be my right to that option if I so choose.

The next question is always “Do you have a plan?”. I didn’t think I did. Not really. I said I didn’t have a time or a place (yet… it was always pretty vague).

She delved deeper. I had eliminated some suicide methods like slashing my wrists (I hate the sight of blood), shooting myself (too much mess) or jumping off a cliff (about one year ago I had walked to the edge of a cliff to suss that out). And I had told them about that too.

No. For me, I was looking at just taking loads of sleeping pills, to send me off into a neverending blissful sleep.

But for my weight, the lethal dosage, the LD₅₀ it’s called because there is a 50% survival rate, is something like 200 to 2000 tablets! I didn’t have enough. And I told them that, too. She went to say something and stopped herself. I think she didn’t want to give me any ideas.

I told her that I didn’t want to destroy my kidneys or my liver by taking too many pills. Plus that was not the right way. Not effective enough.

Well in case you are wondering, I read that overdosing just fucks up your kidneys/liver and cause great agony in the process. Meaning you just don’t die in your sleep, chances are that you wake up choking on your own vomit, have a heart attack or respiratory failure / asphyxiation, none of which sounds pleasant. I didn’t want that. Doing that would add to my problems.

I had also told her that I had imagined holding a gun to my head and testing how far I could pull the trigger (I don’t know how far you need to pull the trigger, I’ve never even held a gun). I had told her I don’t like guns, but that it was lucky I didn’t own a gun because I might have already tested it out. I had imagined my dead body lying on the floor.

One of the last things she asked me about was what (if anything) makes me happy. I told her about my dog. She turned to her computer and said to me “just keep an eye on that dog”. My dog is what is called a “protective factor”. If something were to happen to that dog, I would not be in a good frame of mind. Who knows what might have happened if that had occurred? I dread to think.

That same night I started to actively ‘research’ it. Personally, I wouldn’t consider a few google searches and reading half a dozen websites true ‘research’, but there you go. Later on, I was dwelling on it for hours on end in bed when I should be sleeping. I looked back upon my browsing history just now and it appears I typed into google “easiest overdoses“. Not good.

I was landing on pages like this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. My background is scientific research and to me this was nothing. This wasn’t even ‘research’, it was just me sussing things out. I read them all.

See, what I was thinking about wasn’t going to be a suicide attempt. It was not to “attract attention” as you might be thinking. No. I had actively researched the most effective and efficient suicide methods. I had typed into google things like “easiest overdoses“. I had ignored the special little google window that pops up in first place and says:

Need help? Australia:
13 11 14
Lifeline Australia
Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
Languages: English
Website: https://www.lifeline.org.au

I don’t know why but I wasn’t going to call Lifeine until I was ready to actually go through with something. That’s what I was waiting for, the last moment. Only then would I call. Why waste people’s valuable time?

All I can say is that if you have lingering suicidal thoughts you shouldn’t wait that long, because by then the chances are that you may go through with it (and unfortunately lots of people do). Besides, what happens if you are waiting for that one conversation to stop you and then your phone dies for whatever reason? Luckily for me I had professional help long before any actual suicide attempt. I personally think I was about one to three months away (assuming my situation worsened).

She called me the next day just after midday (I was asleep). She actually asked if I was asleep and I said ‘yes’. That never looks good. Had a brief chat with her. She asked if I had any more suicidal thoughts and I told her that I had thought about it for a few hours. I could tell she was a bit annoyed because she said: “why didn’t you call the number I gave you?”. I honestly don’t remember how I responded to that question.

At that point, she suggested a voluntary admission into the local hospital. I asserted that I didn’t want my freedom taken away from me (like I told her being with my dog makes me happy, plus a couple of other things but not that many to be honest). I said I needed to post something first. She said “can someone else post it for you?”. I said “yes, probably”. That was when she said “mate, you’re actively researching it, you have a plan, you need to get yourself to a hospital”. So she eventually/ultimately talked me into it.

She just said to gather some clothes and I can’t remember what else because quite honestly it was all a bit hazy from then on.

On top of that, she stipulated a time. By that point it was 12:45pm. She said if I wasn’t at the emergency department by 1:30pm they would send someone to come and get me. I don’t know if that would have been police or not, I didn’t ask, but I suppose by that point I realised I was sicker than I thought I was and just accepted the situation — better to walk in voluntarily than be dragged in kicking and screaming.

Yes they probably do have the power to do that (call the cops) based on a mental health assessment. I found out later that yes police do have the power and authority to detain you; you can be ‘sectioned’ under the mental health act and taken to a psychiatric hospital, using force if necessary.

Until then, I never even considered visiting a psychiatric ward, I thought they were for more serious schizophrenic-types of patients, not chronically depressed people. I actually thought I would be going to something called a “sub-acute” ward, one that is not locked (I think). I also expected to talk my way out of it. For some reason, I couldn’t. So they kinda tricked me into it but it’s probably a good thing they did, because by the time I got out, it woke me up.

[continued to part II]

There were always ample warning
There were always subtle signs
And you would have seen them coming
But we gave you too much time
And when you said that no one’s listening
Why’d your best friend drop a dime
Sometimes we get so tired of waiting for a
Way to spend our time

Axl Rose, Coma GNR.

“self-assembly”

February 14, 2017 — leslie dean brown

Still not as good as a fly though is it?

Comparing this to your basic, everyday, run-of-the-mill “garden variety” house fly, here are my questions:

Can the actual printed flying thingo generate more copies of itself? No.
Can it fly without an external power source? No.
Is the laser biodegradeable? No.
Can it navigate obstacles? No.
Does it include sensors? No.

So in other words:

* It doesn’t actually assemble itself, because it requires an external laser.
* It’s not self-regenerative, meaning it can’t produce copies of itself
* It’s not truly ‘sustainable’.

In other words, I think insects are still vastly superior in more ways than one.

What is the amount of carbon dioxide gas generated by all the cars in the world today?

December 20, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I previously wrote an article which contained a simple calculation to estimate the amount of CO2 emitted by 1 litre of petrol. And it was a fairly popular blog post. From there it was easy to estimate the amount of CO₂ produced by driving on one full tank of petrol.

When one litre of petrol is burned, 2.28kg of CO₂are produced, equivalent to 1268 litres of of CO₂ gas!! Every single 50 litre tank full of petrol will produce over 63,400 litres of CO₂gas (63.4 m³), or a volume of pure CO₂gas equivalent to an imaginary cube with sides 4 metres long.

Now I’m going to calculate how much CO₂ is produced by the fleet of 500-600 million cars worldwide using just one full tank of petrol and compare that figure with the total volume of the Earth’s atmosphere.

600,000,000 x 63,400 = 38,000,000,000,000 litres.

38 trillion litres on just one tank of petrol.

What’s the average annual petrol consumption? Average distance driven per year? Easier to get the stats from elsewhere at this point, more reliable:

Cars – together with power stations- are the main producers of CO2. Today 500 million cars world-wide emit four billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – around 20 per cent of the total quantity produced by mankind. And the number of cars on the road is growing rapidly – currently twice as fast as the world’s population. Forecasts assume that this number will reach 2 billion world-wide by the year 2030. This will mean that petrol consumption will grow to an estimated 1.3 billion tonnes by 2030. CO₂ emissions from traffic would then increase to more than 7.5 billion tonnes. Source: greenpeace

I’m an ex-scientist. And scientists deal with numbers. It is our job to try and explain very large numbers to people.

I think we’re all very used to hearing the words ‘thousands’, ‘millions’, ‘billions’ and even ‘trillions’.

And we’re not used to measuring the weight of gases. We’re used to seeing their volume. Aren’t we?

So. If that happens, if CO₂ emissions from traffic increase to 7.5 billion tonnes per annum, why, do you know how many litres that is?

I’ll tell you how many litres of CO₂ that is. It’s 3.82 quadrillion, that’s how many litres of CO₂ that is. Per year.

Now, I’m willing to bet that you don’t even know how big one quadrillion is, let alone 3.82 of them. It’s “fucken huge”, that’s how big it is. Just how much bigger is one quadrillion than one billion?

Let’s imagine there were 3.82 quadrillion people scattered throughout the universe… and that there are 7.5 billion people on each planet¹, there would have to be 509 million planets in existence to total 3.82 quadrillion people.

That’s how much CO₂gas cars pump into one of our Earth’s atmospheres every single year.
3.82 quadrillion litres of CO₂.

What do I think of NASA’s emdrive?

November 23, 2016 — leslie dean brown

Firstly, the name reminds me of emdash —and secondly—

Don’t get your hopes up too much. If the world’s largest 8MW nuclear power station completely powered this emdrive thingo, it would generate 0.68kg of thrust. To put that into perspective, I have just done some very rudimentary calculations, and I think my greyhound generates more thrust on a daily basis… due to flatulence.

Seriously. Someone can check my basic calculations if they don’t believe me. On another note, I can’t believe that no one knows what an average nuclear power station weighs, yet plenty of people have asked about fart volumes.

What am I really saying? I think it’s time we focused a bit more on planet Earth than on silly outer space ventures…

Why I am so concerned about the state of the world.

November 17, 2016 — leslie dean brown

I am worried and very concerned, yes. My background is originally materials science.

From my perspective, the problem is that there is an environmental cost to every single material that you buy — be it gold, cotton, steel, or whatever. People forget that. The economy may benefit from materialism, but the environment certainly doesn’t.

Now, keep in mind that when I did my degree over 15 years ago, the ‘environment’ wasn’t even really discussed in that course. It was all about the properties and structure of materials.

First off, there is a lot of energy required to make materials. So if the country of manufacture uses coal power to generate their electricity, and they are not offsetting those emissions, then whatever physical goods you buy from them is contributing further to climate change.

Why? Because almost all materials either require either energy, heat, or other chemicals (which, in turn, require heat) in order to produce them. That’s a bit of a worry in itself. Because people are generally becoming more materialistic.

So for instance, hunters that shoot animals and think that is a ‘sustainable’ way of life, well I have news for you. If your gun is made of plastic or metal, where does that come from? It all comes from mines. And plastic comes from oil&gas. And your bullets. What are they made from? That too comes from mines. And the gunpowder contains chemicals like sulfur and potassium. And they have to come from somewhere too. And mines don’t last forever…

Currently, the manufacture of every single synthetic material results in carbon emissions somewhere along the line, if only from the energy that is required to create them. I think the correct term is “embodied energy”. [Read more…]