When Whitecoats Rest

When whitecoats rest

they stay standing

they stay near the book

stand silently

so that the tirdness

goes to the ground

by the effect of gravity

When the whitecoats hide in closet

they tell secrets

of people's houses

When whitecoats sleep

they forget about medecine

they dream about being a professional dancer

Shared Maniac Delusion

Delusions change in their content from time to time and from culture to another. These days I have found a new common delusion between Iraqi patients with bipolar disorder, a disorder where the patient have episodes of mania and depression. In their manic episode many patients state that they can fix all Iraqi problems.
I start to screen for mania by asking this question of: do you believe you can fix all Iraqi problems? as a screen for grandiose delusion.
One of the diagnosed patients with mania say: Its very easy man, just give me a huge container of petrol and I will put it in Baghdad's centre and all people can come and take all the petrol they need and thats all...
Another said: just give me a little piece of land in Baghdad with green grass to built my tent on it and then I will fix it all..

pessimisim Vs. optimism

We tend to believe that positive events are more likely to happen to ourselves and usually don't believe that negative events are likely to happen to us.

Before one

year a report said that the probability to be killed in Iraq has raised 50 folds...but inspite of that we believe that harm will not reach us...it may reach others...but not us...

In sociology this is called unrealistic optimism.

We believe that we are at lower risk than others and that others' actions are more risky than ours.

when I think about that I get depressed, cause am living in Iraq, and I don't want to be trapped by that social misperception of unrealistic optimism.... does that means I must be a realistic pessimist?...

Pessimism can help me to be away from dangers....but...if i can do nothing about that...it will only bring me good deal of depression...

Optimism is unreal but it helps to keep us healthy...

I remembered the Swiss story of William Tell and the apple above his son's head...and how he succeed in hiting the apple and not his son's head..

If there is an apple above my head...

I will not wait for someone to shoot...I will take it in my hands and bite it....

yeah...life is delicious...just take your bite..

Help me to diagnose (case 2)

Chief complaint: disturbed memory for 1 month…
Since 1 month and the patient is having difficulties in performing learned skills like cooking food and washing dishes and clothes and taking care of her children….yet the patient got no difficulty at all in remembering names of persons, objects, nor having any difficulty in language.
When she is given cues about how to do a previously learned skill she remembers the skill easily and start to do it with ease.
Her husband noticed that she had difficulty in taking decisions, and always responds to his suggestions by "I don't know", or by "as you like", even to simple daily decisions.
Before 3 years, after moving from Beigit to Mosul and a change in economic status due to loss of her job as a teacher due to the political change after the war of 2003 in Iraq, she started to have strange sensation in her head (tingling), and difficulty in getting asleep for 20 days followed by going out of her house suddenly one morning and making a long trip to unknown cause to multiple places and going back late in the evening to home.
She continued to have difficulty in sleep and abused benzodiazepines, but she start later to have some repetitive non goal directed movements, poor appetite, decrease speech, self neglect, and lastly hearing voices giving commands.
She first visited a psychiatrist in 2005, and was treated by a combination of drugs. But after few months she also left the house suddenly, but this times she phoned her husband telling him that she was kidnapped by a gang, she was found to be calling from a public phone and that she was lying, that was explained by her that she wanted to kill herself, without leaving a trace…
After having a still birth in late 2005 she wrote a letter and left in the house stating that she was kidnapped by a gang and no need to search for her…
She was found after that in the streets after trying to through herself from a bridge as she claims…
Since the beginning of her condition and she never went back to her previous functioning

Got no family history of mental illness

Mental State Exam.:
Middle aged lady, clean, skin rash in her face, tense, sitting restless on the edge of the chair and wringing her hands, cooperative, obedient, but perplexed.
Scanty speech with low voice.
Got command hallucinations asking her to kill herself…
Cognitive exam reveals poor concentration, attention, and memory.

Franz Fanon and Biological Racism

Franz Fanon is a psychiatrist from the Martinique, searved in Algeria during the French occupation of Algeria, but he turn against France when the Algerians started their revolution against France occupation....

He once noticed that a well known french psychaitrist teachs in the college telling his students that the Algerian people got no developed brain cortex.... and to his surprise that profesor had no evidence at all...he was just following his what is called as Biological Racism...

Mwnnqithe The Box Of Poems

When I was living in the city of medecine in Baghdad, we had to walk for about 10 minutes to reach the place where we can have dinner, and the walk was stressful due to the sounds of bullets we may hear, or sounds of emergency cars or police cars which are very stressing.....but thanks god there was this man from Al Hilla Babylon, the city I adore too much for its piecfulness and culture....Mwnnqithe (in arabic means the resquer), he resqued me from my stress by his great deal of poems he got in his memory, and by great deal of wisdom rich stories he rehearse from the history, he likes encyclopedias, and he is a one living and walking....

Thank you Mwnqithe for all the stories and poems you told me....and I hope piece will come back to our country and I can travel to you and hear some stories again.....

Ali and Edmund Husserl

When I first shared a room with my coleague Dr. Wisam Ali Ameen, and he knew am a psychiatrist, the first question he asked me was: Do you know horsa? or hussro? or husserl? or I don't know how they call him? When I said : No, sorry I don't know him...Dr. Wisam told me that I got to meet Dr. Ali Omari...

I met Dr. Ali Omari that day and after he welcomed me in my knew lodgment he asked me while giving me a red eye: Do you know Edmund Husserl? I answered with some embaressment that I don't know him....and to my great embaressment Dr. Ali replyed that all Iraqi psychiatrist don't know him....

The next days was full of expanations and elaborations on phenomenology from Dr. Ali who was talking with highly expressed emotions cause he was annoyed that am a psychiatrist and doesn't know about Husserl...

I only met Dr. Ali these days online, and he told me about another philosophe, and that was Jacque Derrida,.....I new that name but I know nothing more than he is a specialist in linguistics...and that really bothered Dr. Ali....

Anyway without my arguings with Dr. Ali I would have not known Husserl, nor Derrida, so that helped me alot..and enriched my mind...

Well does Dr. Ali has the right to be critical to Iraqi psychiatrists because they don't know about philosophical schools?

Do I Lover Her (final episode)

Well.....let us made an end to the series entitled DO I LOVE HER, she said that she is deeply in love with someone else.....she told me that while I was listening to the song of "different corners" by george michael (this song was sent from her to me with the notice of: am not dedication this song to you, just listen to this romantic song), she meant that I should not think that she want to tell me something throught the words of that song, that is I don't take the words of this song as if she is trying to tell me something.....
After she told me that that day I went to my room quitly, eat my dinner slow and alone as usual, then took off my clothes slowly, went to the bath, I took a long shower but I did not use soaps or shampoo, actually I just stand under the water, I was not thinking, but something was going on in my mind, I don't know what is it...
At night I saw a film by Woody Alen where he loved a woman and he tryed to find a man for her...that comedy made me laugh.......so...life must go on....

Here he is trying to made her look sexy..

They went to buy something before he got her introduced to the new man...

He leaves them alone her to know each other more...

She gave Woody Alen a kiss...

Well....I will no more write in my blog about this lady....I hope she enjoys her life....I think I can control my emotions at this stage....hope I can treat her as a friend and forget about this love thing....

A castle and a tomb on the river

On the river side in Mosul you can see the remnants of many old cities and civilizations here is the castle of Bashtabya from the Othman era where it could contain about 3000 soldier, and got underground passages to the important other places of the government...





next to it is the tomb of one of the sons of Al Hussain, who is an important figure in Islam

It is hot in summer and young men are swimming near by

To the centre of mosul (al sarej khana)

Here is the main street where doctors clinics (the famous ones) are here:



And you may see coffeshops every where even in the secuare between main streets...

When you go to the sides you found markets in the narrow ways between the buildings where the ceiling is made up of thin sheets of metal or old clothes....

Water flow through the small tunnels in the street carrying waste products..

Electricity

I was sitting in the chair of my hair dresser when electricity went off...he went to the corner...done something...it came back....then after few minutes this accur again...up to four times....and each time electricity went off he went to the corner and do that something and electricity came back....

He don't like talking to much...so i did not ask....when he end with me...I went to that conrner and saw this thing...

These are the electricity lines he got for his shop...

He got 5 lines...one is from the national supply to the shops (the only one in before 1991), the next one is from the commercial electricity generators owned by people, next one is from national supply to his nearby home (he managed to take a wire from his home), the other is from the commercial supply to his home....the fifths is from ..I forgot actually...

he smiled to me and said but I will get rid of all these...I will have a line from the nationa;l supply o the lights of streets !!!

Sorry Saad My Friend

These days iraqi people regard happiness as a wrongdoing I think, you feel happy for a while and maybe remorse or guilt for that feeling on the next days... I think we used to live in sadness...that was what happened to me when saw SAAD my freind holding flowers and smiling widely to me that morning before about 4 months in Valentine Day...I was feeling angry at him cause he's happy I think....I told him with cold blood that there is no reason for me share him the little party (of drinking tea) in the valentine day....he insisted...i went to drink tea but i tried to made fun of him with the other freinds invited to the tea party.....now i live away from Saad....I miss him too much...and am deeply sorry for him cause I acted that way with him....

I took his agreement to publish his pictures of that day with flowers

...and i wanna say to him:" Saad you are one of the rare healthy wonderful nice strong people living in Iraq these days....keep smiling....I learned many things from you....you are really special"

A walk with sheeps

when you walk in Mosul these days it is easy to find sheeps walking with you....they walk in the city centre....near doctors clinics like this picture...

and they walk by the river side (river of tigres)...

from hospital's balcony

every time I feel that life is not anymore beautiful in my country, (i got this feeling alot when am at work in the psychiatric ward), I went to the balcony of our ward and see throught Mosul....it makes me breath fresh air again...

Lost in papers

These days my table is very diverse in its content… and I don't know really how I come to include all these into my reading list…actually it is wrong cause am lost…and I do not get enough information from one topic till I shift to the other…well it makes me feel little disappointed….we usually get illegally copied textbooks of psychiatry…

Music the unthinkable…

Well it has been some time since am feeling strange about myself and about what am feeling toward a clever beautiful lady which I have known through the yahoo chatting (I did not met her in real life till now), and I was asking myself about what I really want from her. About what can happen between me and her. What were my goals?. What was my motivation? Can it be real? Well…I tried to think as logical as I can…as real as it can be…I tried to resist my fantasies and I did that successfully especially these late days….and I quit my old habit of being online waiting for her o come online…(that was really a suffering)…anyway…I tried to forget about her for one week…it was nearly successful…

It was nearly successful….yeah….but….today….after the panoramic fast rotatory circulatory colored noisy morning of work in the psychiatric ward in the hospital with the exact number of clients that you need to be little drowsy and little eccentric as if you are yourself kind of a client (sometimes the word client is used instead of patient when you want not to label a person seeking the psychiatric help as a patient)…so…it was nearly successful till this afternoon when I felt like I have drunk a pint of bear …or make it 2 please….so…I was smiling with my self a second…not knowing why…then become little sad….with myself…and I don't know why again….seems to be some remnants of some parts of some stories I just heard this day in the morning… I went to the room of meetings in the ward...opened the computer…I got there a song of George Michael called "this is not real love" and this song was sent to me by that lady…who confused me a little….am writing now while the headphones are in my head stimulating my head from both sides…holding my head from my ears…and I think now am little….

What to say…this is something cannot put it in words….the song and that lady…well….

………

I bet this is love……