Life trauma, Crisis, Depression

Such was the topic of the conference I went to on the weekend. The main topic underlying the somewhat tragic title was suicide, and suicide prevention. This was the first conference I went to, not counting the time when back in high school I came with Mum to Sydney to some sort of art history conference, but spent most of my time exploring Sydney and much less time being interested in all the presentations.

The conference was very interesting. There were a lot of different topics, and even one whole part dedicated to my two favourite topics of immigration and the elderly and the associated rate of suicide. Here are some (what I think) interesting facts that I took away with me:

GENDER DIFFERENCES

• women are 2-3 times more at risk of depression than men
• every 5th man, and every 3rd woman will suffer from depression at least once in their life
• men have a 3 times higher suicide rate than women
• women have 3 times higher rate of suicide attempts than men
• preventative programs (against suicide) work on about 90% of women, but almost never on men
• marriage or having a loving partner works as a protective mechanism against depression and suicide for men (that's why a lot of men can't get over the loss of their partners - rate of suicide amongst older men is much higher than in older women - see below), but for women, children (not partner) seem to be that protective mechanism
  

ELDERLY

• older men (men over 60 y.o.) have a 5 times higher rate of suicide than same aged women
• only 7% of people who call crisis hotlines are people over 60 y.o.
• out of 9402 suicides in Germany in 2008, 3993 were by people over 60 y.o. (2790 men, 1203 women)- that's almost 43% - however the number of preventative programs for older people is significantly less than for younger people, because suicide amongst the elderly is more accepted than that in young people
• the rate of suicide dramatically increases after 80 y.o.
• flexibility to changing life circumstances, acceptance of help, social support systems play a protective role

DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

• in all people who get depression, in 85-100% it is likely to reoccur at some point in their lives
• of all people who get depressed, 12% have depression that lasts longer than 2 years
• out of all people who commit suicide, 60% suffered from depression (perhaps not so surprising... the interesting thing would be to look at the other 40% and see what was the underlying condition there)
• people with unipolar depression are more at risk of getting cardiovascular diseases
• people who have bipolar depression have a higher rate of diabetes than in general population
• 50% of people with anxiety disorders develop depression
• 340 million of people in the world suffer from depression

IMMIGRATION AND SUICIDE

• after immigration, the risk of suicide dramatically increases 10 years after arrival
• according to WHO, in Russia, 70.6 men (per 100 000 people) commit suicide, compared to 11.9 women (compared to 21.2 men, 5.1 women in Australia; and 20.2 men, 7.3 women in Germany)
• amongst migrants the rate of suicide is much higher in the second generation migrants than in the first
• in Germany the highest rate of suicide is amongst young Turkish women
• in Berlin, 23.45% of total population are migrants... out of these 40.7% are under 18 y.o.
• education seems to be one of the more important protective factors against suicide - along with religion, tradition, family and being able to speak the local language
• the rate of suicide amongst migrants reflects the rate of suicide in the country of origin (ie. the rate of suicide amongst Russian migrants in Germany reflects the rate of suicide in Russia)

YOUTH AND SUICIDE

• in Germany, 10% of young men, and 20% of young women have suicidal thoughts
  
• 10.1% of young men and 19.9% of young women physically harm themselves (eg. cut their arms, etc.)
• in 90% of cases of physical harm, suicidal thoughts, or suicide attempts, the parents have no idea
• in the USA, suicide is the most common cause of death amongst 10-19 y.o.

The very first presentation was about a British singer and songwriter Nick Drake, who committed suicide when he was 26. If you don't know his music (and to my shame I didn't before this presso), it's amazingly good :)

Resistance is futile

Banjo is so different to Unix. Unix is a softy inside and out - and if he does something wrong and you make him aware of it (by, for example, yelling at him), he'll put his tail down and run away to hide... and will be unlikely to re offend any time soon. Banjo is a completely different story. His rehabilitation period lasts about 2 seconds (if it ever exists). He re offends straight away and gives a hugely surprised look when he gets told off yet again - kind of in the art of "huh? why are you bothering me human?"

He became a big fan of the bathtub... may be it's a British short-haired thing, because Sommerset (my parents' cat) also loves anything to do with water - and spends hours a day lying in the bathroom sink. I don't like Banjo in the bathtub, because he keeps leaving black paw prints on it, and I'm sick of cleaning them before I can take a shower. No amount of discouragement seems to work. And recently it has gotten worse... on the side of the bathtub along with various shampoos and what-not, we have a sponge, that is used to clean the bathtub (from his very paw prints among other things). Well apparently the little devil doesn't have enough toys (of which there are about 10 lying all over the flat), and he decided that the sponge is also a toy. So now I find this poor sponge under the table, under the couch, next to his food bowl... *sigh* why, why, why?! I wish he could talk and explain to me his fascination with it, and just in general his desire to be naughty in ways I never thought were even possible...

Here's a little movie of him playing with a catnip toy mouse on a new cat tree that Jack put together for them.

Against falsification

Some of you might have seen in the news last week the verbal sparring that went on in Gdansk between Putin and Donald Tusk, about the actual "real and truthful" start of WWII. Polish were blaming the Ruskies, and Ruskies were blaming the Polish - it was all a bit of same old, same old. What is fascinating though, is that I found out today that as of May 2009 a new commission has been established in Moscow. It's goal: "to oppose attempts at falsification of history." Effectively this commission was established to make sure that the West and any Russian (erroneous) historians do not try to bend the truth and put Russia in a bad light. Especially seeing as there has been a lot of talk recently about USSR being at fault for Hitler starting WWII, as well as talk of Soviet soldiers being less than noble in Eastern Europe around that time. Either way it looks like this commission is just another Kremlin propaganda machine. The funniest thing is that two books have since been published by this commission, which address the roles of Poland and Baltic states in WWII. These books are composed from the recently-made-public secret German and Polish documents (which "apparently" came into posession of soviet spies at the time), which detail how very nasty all those countries were. Incidentally, no other copies of these documents seem to exist anywhere else. But that doesn't make the authors blink an eye: "Well the originals must have been lost when Germany cleared out polish archives in the start of the war" - or so they say... to end this post on a more philosophical question - can there ever be one absolute truth?

Fun with Sibir

We decided to fly to Novosibirsk for New Year celebrations, so I found myself looking for flights online. Normally I just fly Aeroflot, 'cos they're usually on time and have good planes, service, etc. Except this time they were very expensive, so I was forced to look for other options. Alas I found reasonably priced tickets with Sibir (S7). They had an on-line special on their very new and swish website with very good flight times, so I decided to book with them. As I was putting in my credit card details and clicking 'pay', a red message came up which said something along the lines of "You transaction could not be processed, please call our service centre... ". So I called the Moscow service centre and got told that since I'm trying to pay for tickets with an overseas credit card they need me to fill out a couple of forms, which will be sent to my email address shortly. Fine, I thought - not that I have a choice in the matter it seems... and it doesn't sound too difficult anyway. A couple of hours later an email came, where I was asked to scan and email the front and back of my credit card along with my passport and also fill in and sign an attached document, which said the following "I (name) wish to purchase (ticket details) with credit card (credit card details). By signing this document I hereby declare that I will not hold Sibir Airlines liable for any unauthorised transactions, should they occur." Hmmm... that was a bit too much for me, so we are now flying Ural Airlines instead (which, although having a pretty basic website, didn't have problems processing my German credit card in real time). I am still baffled by this type of service, even though it doesn't surprise me coming from Russia :)