About Mental Health
We’re talking about the subject, everywhere, and apropos, a family-practitioner friend told me recently, that in the future, hopefully in the near future, he will be recruiting a mental health practitioner to his family practice in addition to the Diabetes and Hypertension specialist.
That would really improve care a notch, and handle cracks before they become breaks.
For weeks now, since the launch on September 17th, my friends tell me that the Squid Games series on Netflix is a must-see, and I cannot call myself Bati Bleki without watching it.
I attempted on Monday. I settled down in front of the TV with some low-cal, gluten free chips ready to be entertained. I lasted through the home scene with the old, bent-over grandma, the intense horse racing scene, the win, the pathetic over-promising phone call to wife, down to the bathroom drama, then I turned this thing off.
You cannot be catering to your mental health if you watch that. It’s just too much to digest, too graphic, too violent.
The series became #1 on Netflix overnight, and according to Bloomberg is now worth $900M.
That’s insane.
It is the most stressful, heartless, inhumane, blood and gore series ever produced. To watch it, you must anesthetize your humanity and hermetically close your heart. Reportedly only 66% of viewers, or 87 million people around the globe, have managed to finish the series in its first three weeks.
Sure, the theme is universal, what people are prepared to do in order to survive, but in this case the South Koreans crossed my line.
If you are concerned about your mental health, if you want to preserve your emotional equilibrium, stay away.
And we had ample examples of people cracking recently, the hyper-charged beach bum on the wave-runner, the young DJ that dropped from the third floor, the businessman who refused to pay for a burger, these are not just accidents, these are total breakdowns as a result of stress, accumulated over time to the point of no return.
Take care of yourself.
Save water – shower with a friend
A Dutch government minister — Relacion Interior Kajsa Ollongren — just recently surprised many when she devised a campaign to teach residents of the BES islands to save water and electricity. She was ridiculed for recommending shorter showers and less use of air-conditioning. While her intentions were good, she was misinformed.
What triggered her initiative was a survey, she conducted, that found that islanders on average use more utilities than the Dutch. Apparently, her survey sample was too small to be correct, and she forgot how hot it is around our islands, and how air-conditioning is not really a luxury.
I often hear that our Dutch counterparts have no real understanding as to what life on the islands is like.
HOWEVER, according to me, she hit a nerve. We are wasteful. Incredibly wasteful, and it would be good to teach us to save, in all aspects of our lives.
Example? The good minister budgeted 200 Euro for flyers and 200 Euro for social media.
We should learn to budget too, in our personal lives, mostly not be wasteful with our health, and with our hard-earned resources.
