Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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?

Saturday, July 14, 2007

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....

Thursday, July 12, 2007

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



Sunday, July 08, 2007

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..

Friday, July 06, 2007

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...

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

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……

Friday, June 15, 2007

Do I love her (part 3)

can we love deliberately?

these are some scientists asnwering the question:

Albert Ellis Ph.D.
usually ... you strongly favor a few traits of your beloved....such as beauty and intelligence...and you firmly convince yourself that your beloved uniquely possesse them and fall in love with that "special" person.


Robert Milardo, Ph.D. president of international association for relationships research
romantic love may feel magical, but we learn to love in a deliberate fashion. can we learn to love just anyone? no, we need shared core beliefs and attitudes, a simplse foundation on which we build...


James Morris Ph.D. presedent of american association for marriage and familly therapy
"we were made for each other" is a romantic falsehood tend to obscure the actual work involved in creating love between two people. this work involves shared commitment, responsibility, fidelity, and mutual would do well to think more in terms of "choosing" and "creating" love together.

can we love deliberately?

Do I Love Her? (part 2)

I will try to make the triangular theory of love more clear....so love has three components according to this theory...intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment....by mixing these 3 components with defferent strengths ...we will get different types of love....

If a erlation has strong intimacy component but no other component, it will be called Liking... if we mix intimacy with a strong strength of passion, we will get what is called as Romantic Love....and the tringular diagram will tell you what could be when we mix other components...


Consummate Love is when we mix all the components to the sasme strong strength...


for my case it seems that I got a romantic love or infatuation to the lady am dedicating this search in love...can you tell me about your type of love....

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Mosul the old fationed




Mosul is an old fashioned city with many old buildings and even old traditions and culture…people here are still living as if they are living in a 50 years before…..sometimes as if 100 year before with believe in witchcraft and magic…as a psychiatrist I rarely see a patient who came to me asking for help before going to a traditional healer who treated him or her by trying to get the genie (evil soul) out of the body of the patient….well sometimes they beat the patient heavily to a degree that he or she have fractures…and sometimes patient came to tell us that the traditional healer had told them to go to the psychiatrist to receive for example 2 sessions of ECT…some old types of work are still present like the man who walks and sells some juices like this man…


Do I Love Her?

Love…that commonly used term in our daily life….in our public and in our secret life too…used by all of us sometime…maybe it is all the time dormant inside us…just need a trigger and it will come spontaneously from our unconscious hidden memories to our consciousness….we have said "I love you" many times to many persons…but what did that really mean?....what is love is all about?...does it mean the same thing for all of us?....

A chat with an intelligent sensitive person before 2 days made feel in need that I search for theories of love especially from the psychological point of view….and for that person who knows herself I dedicate this summary:

From the many theories about love that varies in their views and almost all of them have no evidence to prove worthy…but I found few to worth mention here….this is not to say that other theories are not nice to read about but I want to give a summary to be stick in our memory and not lost in details…..

Plato said that when we love a person, we love an abstraction or image of the person's best qualities….so we don't love a person for his or her unique qualities….

In 1986, Robert Sternberg comes with his famous triangular theory of love…which states that love has three components:
1. Intimacy (closeness, connectedness, and bondedness)
2. Passion (romance, physical attraction and sexual consummation)
3. Decision / Commitment (in the short term there is the decision to love and in the long term there is the decision to maintain the love).

What was strange to find is that about 13 % of cultures have no word for love (from the book of a natural history of love by Ackerman, Diane in 1994).....

The Chinese character for love is also worth to mention:

It means from top to bottom: that which gives breath (i.e.spirit) to the heart, with graceful motion…

Monday, June 11, 2007

help me to diagnose

The strange stories always come on the afternoon….after the usual headache of the morning….& after a fast fatty lunch….i got dizziness added to the headache due to the shift of blood supply from my brain to my stomach and intestines….
Taking my dizzeness and headache with me…. I went to the ward again to see a newly admitted client..who was very quit and silent in the morning to a degree that we missed taking history from him till afternoon when my colleague had told me that one of us must go back after lunch to take history from him…I volunteered…

He was a clean handsome young man with stylish clothes and clever look in his eyes and very polite and calm and peaceful in behavior…. His story came like this by his own words:

Before one year an explotion occur in the street and some man was injured… I volunteered to take him to the hospital… and then in the hospital I saw many injured people and volunteered to give blood for the sake of anyone…the nurse was fast when taking blood from me…that was not my first volunteer to give blood…but the nurse was very fast because of the stressful situation by then and when he took the needle out of my vein I moved my arm and severe pain occurred at the site of the entry of the needle.....since then I got pain which is COLD…. It is coldness and pain at the same time…going above from my forearm … the left one…. till reaching the left shoulder … then going into my left side of chest then to the abdomen…. This pain prevents me from work….and sometimes from sleep…since one year I have quit working in the market as I used to do as a salesman….i keep going to doctors but they did not cured my pain…before four months I had dreamt of prophet Mohamed telling me that is I amputate my hands I will get better….doctor please I do not need anything from you….. am not psychiatrically ill…but I came to the psychiatry unit because the surgeon I visit told me that he will not do an amputation for me till I visit you…I don't know why he asked me to visit you…but I think you can help me by giving me a paper writing on it that am insightful and having no mental illness… and if you want me to stay so that you examine me psychiatrically it is ok…I will stay… examine me….but I want you to promise me that if you find me insightful and having no mental illness.. promise me that you give me a paper saying that you are agree that I need to amputate my left arm as prophet Mohamed told me…and I think you do not consider yourself more wise than prophet Mohamed…are you?

That was the summary of his story…and it is worthy to say that he did not volunteered to say all that easily…I encouraged him to talk and used many techniques of the psychiatric interview to let him come with these information…the history taking took about an hour but to my surprise it took away my headache and dizziness from me….during his stay in the hospital he was completely normal person…what do u think?

concept of schizophrenia

19th century 2 views

1. Wilhelm Griesinger’s unitary psychosis (einheitpsychose).

he thought that all mental illnesses are the same illness but in different sevirity.



2. Benedict A.Morel in 1852 coined demence precoce (early dementia) to describe a disorder that start in adolescence and leading to withdrawal, odd mannerisms, self neglect and finally to
intellectual deterioration.

Karl Kahlbaum (1863) described the syndrome of catatonia.






Ewald Hecker (1871) described what he called as hebephrenia.



Emil Kraeplin



Division of severe mental disorders into 2: dementia praecox (partial improvement) and manic depressive psychosis (full recovery).

13% of his patients did recover.


3 subtypes: catatonic, hebephrenic, and paranoid.
. Described dementia praecox: “a series of states, the common characteristic of which is a peculiar destruction of the internal connections of the psychic personality”(1919)



Kraepelin believed that dementia praecox was primarily a disease of the brain, and particularly a form of dementia

Coined the name paraphrenia for a condition that start in middle life with no changes in emotions and volition.

Later Bleuler added the 4th as: simple.
Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist, coined the term schizophrenia, did not consider delusions, hallucinations, and catatonic symptoms to be necessary for Dx. Leading to the idea that we could Dx. Schizophrenia without the presence of psychotic symptoms (simple schizophrenia).
4As : Association
Affect
Autism
Ambivalence (apathy)

Bleuler realized the illness was not a dementia (it did not always lead to mental deterioration) and could sometimes occur late as well as early in life and was therefore misnamed.
Bleuler believed that dementia praecox subsumed multiple disorders that differed in etiology and pathogenesis but certain clinical features in common.

Conflict between Kraeplin & Bleuler views reached its peak in 1950s leading to the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia which showed that USA and URSS got broader concepts of schizophrenia than Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, India, Nigeria, Taiwan, and the UK “WHO 1973”.
Norwegian psychiatrist Langfeldt differentiate between schizophrenia and schizophreniform psychosis. In that they got different outcome and in that ECT and insulin coma therapy were ineffective in schizophrenia (1960).
DSM-IV term schizophreniform disorder is used in a different way than that meant by Langfeldt. According to modern diagnostic criteria, most of Langfeldt’ schizophreniform stated would be classified as mood disorder (Bergen et al.,1990)
Clinical psychologists in USA developed series of rating scales – the Elgin, Phillips, and Kantor scales- to differentiate between process and non-process schizophrenia mainly on the basis of premorbid personality and psychosexual adjustment
Both Langfeldt and the American psychologists assumed that true process schizophrenia was endogenous and hereditary, and that schizophreniform or non-process (“reactive”) psychosis were psychogenic, but neither succeeded in demonstrating a clear demarcation between the two.


Kurt schneider (1887-1967)
the first rank symptoms.
Pseudoneurotic schizophrenia (Hoch and Polatin 1949):
patient had a wide range of neurotic symptoms, such as phobias, obsessions, and depersonalization, often associated with severe anxiety and attacks of psychotic disturbance lasting days, hours or perhaps only minutes.
Some authorities, like Kleist and Leonard in Germany and Langfeldt in Norway, insisted that the term should be restricted to illnesses resulting in permanent damage to the personality; others used it freely regardless of outcome.
Some insisted on the presence of certain key symptoms; others were prepared to make a confident dx. on the basis of indefinable subjective impressions, the so-called “praecox feeling”.
Leonard distinguished schizophrenia from the cycloid psychosis, a group of non-affective psychosis of good outcome (1957).

Adolf Meyer saw schizophrenia as a reaction to life events. However, he recognized the importance of biological predisposition.

Some authors say that anyone, if had enough of the right stresses, will develop schizophrenia.
DSM-I was heavily influenced by Meyer’s thoughts and referred to schizophrenic reactions.
DSM-II moved toward a disease entity.
DSM-III & IV attempted to be atheoretical.
Presently, the stress-diathesis model for schizophrenia reigns supreme, but as developmental neurobiology evolves, other more sophisticated models may prove useful
In Denmark and Norway, cases of psychosis arising after stressful events have received much attention. The term reactive psychosis, or psychogenic psychosis are commonly applied to conditions which appear to be ppt. by stress and have good prognosis.
In current dx. Schemes such disorders would be classified as brief psychotic disorder or schizophreniform disorder.
Studies examining the diagnosis of schizophrenia have typically shown relatively low, or inconsistent levels of diagnostic reliability. Most famously, David Rosenhan's 1972 study, published as On being sane in insane places, demonstrated that the diagnosis of schizophrenia was (at least at the time) often subjective and unreliable. More recent studies have found agreement between any two psychiatrists when diagnosing schizophrenia tends to reach about 65% at best33. This, and the results of earlier studies of diagnostic reliability (which typically reported even lower levels of agreement) have led some critics to argue that the diagnosis of schizophrenia should be abandoned34.
They pointed to Japan, where the category schizophrenia was replaced with "integrated disorder" in 2004, as a possible model

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Explosions…. Bullets….Again….





I was a nice morning and the psychiatric ward was full of patients and psychiatric staff including me and another colleague and a female senior psychiatrist standing in the main collidor discussing a newly admitted case while we had not yet finished our morning tour… there were some patient standing in the collidor, one of them believes he is a prophet and that he had died 20 times before and came back to life… in the middle of our conversation an explosion shaked the floor below our feet and the all the door shivered together.. especially the locked ones.. making some shaky low pitched (male) noise … and the windows had cried while their glass had broken into small pieces adding a voice of an acute high pitched (female) sound… our prophet laughed strangely in a loud voice and murmured "they disserve it".. while the female senior psychiatrist searched with her wonderful blue bright eyes into eyes for an explanation…. I gave her a long short eye to eye contact then prvert my gaze downward and sigh.. she sighed… then continue our morning tour fastly…

In the evening

I was walking back from the ward to my room at evening to have my dinner.. when I was passing inside the main inside door of the hospital (ibn seena hospital) a heard a sound of crashes of glass and of a metal on the floor… me and a worker in the hospital and a visitor to a patient start to search about the source of those sounds and we found lately a bullet below a chair in the welcoming room.. these are pictures….

A Finnish In Iraq


It was late in that afternoon when Mr.S, the new client in our ward, whom I did not take history till that time from him, came asking for a pencil and a paper. Usually, our clients don't do that. I searched for him and found a paper, give it to him, he said that that paper will not help, because it contains lines on it, he needed a blank one.. I found one for him with difficulty and then gave him my second pen and asked him to give it back to me when he finnish..

Went to lunch… back in the evening… I saw Mr.S had drawn a symmetrical shape looking like a flower in that paper… full of details…I told him it is nice.. he told me if he got colors it will be nicer..

We managed to find coloring pencils and this is a sample of his work…

We went to the room of the resident doctor (me) and start together to collect the history of the psychiatric problem of Mr.S. and it came as this:

In 1991 he was a solder in the Iraqi army his duty was in the borderline between Iraq and Saudi (KSA).. at war a plane came suddenly and through something on them.. he did not know about his 2 fellows, but he also did not know about himself till he woke up in a clean room in a hospital and start to cry… a man came to him and told him in Arabic language that he is in Finland….in a hospital and he was unconscious for 3 months... the man knew our client's name, from the identity card which was with him….but when ask our client about more details of his personal history.. Our client found that he cannot remember personal information about himself... he was told that after that bomb he was found by UN workers unconscious and with dry blood on his ears, nose and mouth… and covered nearly totally with soil… he was taken to KSA then to Finland to receive treatment... on the account of the UN…
He gradually start to become better.. but his memory was very bad regarding his past history and also regarding his everyday life… but that problems in memory become less after 3 months when the medical staff of the hospital he was in (in the city of TORKO) adviced him to stay in hospital in the morning but go at the night to an apartment they helped him to found it… when he did that, he start to feel frightened and start to feel that others may harm him and that maybe a persecution against him and started to hear voices commenting on him…he was advised to stay in the hospital 24 hr/24 hr and start to receive psychiatric treatment…but voices keep following him and finally was advised to draw when hearing voices and when he did that he found it helpful more than all the other drug he took (the finally used drug was LEPONEX)… stayed for one year in TORKO.. then moved to hospital NIVA NEMI in the city of KOPIO where he stayed for 5 years… then move to hospital of LIPAKOTI in the city of KALAKOSKI where he spent more than one year and a half…start to work in LIPAKOTI as a cleaner… took the Finnish Nationality in 1998…he gathered some sum of money in the bank as a retire salary….but he know nothing now about that sum of money because he was sent back to Iraq in 2001 without his agreement where he was imprisoned by the intelligent security forces for few months in Baghdad just because he was treated abroad without the agreement of the government and they took his nationality identity card from him and also his passport… and sense then lost contact with anything in Finland which he belong for it too much and hope that he goes back to it and see again the sea of Balteek…

under this last picture he wrote that: life is a long way full of roses and thorns...so those who do not know how to enjoy smelling the flowers....will not know how to get away from the thorns.. these were his own words as he said