Author Joanna Cannon: why I’m going back to the psychiatric wards

Joanna Cannon’s to-do list for next month includes attending the British Book Industry Awards in which her bestselling debut novel has been shortlisted, and pouring tea for people with dementia and their carers in a village hall.

Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, who quit psychiatry more than two years ago to concentrate on writing, is returning to the NHS as a volunteer with Arts for Health. Its programme, run by South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS foundation trust, brings creative arts to patients. Tea-making aside, she is keen to help patients understand their own life story through “reading for wellbeing” groups and creative writing.

Cannon once retreated to read for two weeks solid after her mental health deteriorated while working as a junior doctor, and she started writing “for therapy” on a blog. “I wrote that blog to understand myself more,” she explains. “If you read some of the early entries they’re all full of doom and gloom because I was trying to process the things I was seeing as a junior doctor. Not by talking directly about them, obviously, because that would be unethical, but by talking about my reaction to things. I think reading and writing is the best way of understanding your narrative from a safe position… reading is also an escape more than anything else. When I had that two weeks off and read books I felt as though I’d left my own life for a bit and just enjoyed being somewhere else, and I think that’s important for patients. Also creative writing will give them an outlet to talk about how they feel without actually having to talk about how they feel.”

The only child of a plumber and a giftshop owner, Cannon grew up in Derbyshire and left school at 15 with one O-level. It wasn’t until her 30s that she took her A-levels, spurred by her resolve to become a doctor. She qualified in her early 40s but became very stressed during her first stint as a junior doctor in general medicine.

“I thought, ‘yes, I can do this, it’s fine, I know what to do,’” she recalls of her first job – to certify a death certificate. “But when I got there it really impacted on me being in the room with relatives and talking to them, so I just went to the loo and cried. And I thought, ‘that’s fine, this is my first time and it will get easier’. But it didn’t, it got worse. I spent my whole weekends going over and over everything that happened.”

At the time, she told no one how mentally unwell she felt. “It’s very difficult to talk to a consultant you don’t really know that well and admit that you’re struggling, because everyone else appears to be coping … and the consultants clearly cope … so to hold your hand up and say ‘actually, I can’t deal with this’ – you feel weak and stupid and a failure that all this money has been poured into your education to get you to this point and you’ve squandered it by not coping.”

She lauds Prince William and Prince Harry for talking about mental health as part of the Heads Together campaign. “People say the stigma is lifting, but I don’t think it is. You talk to somebody with schizophrenia or bipolar or depression or anxiety and I don’t think they would think it was lifting. The NHS does try and encourage people to talk more, but you are only reflecting the general attitude that it’s just too difficult to admit to it sometimes. I’ve so much admiration for Prince Harry. It’s amazing to have such a massive public platform and get on that platform and speak about something like that.”

Cannon is all too aware that encouraging people to speak up needs to be matched by services to meet need. As the general election looms, this former NHS worker echoes the call for more funding so that mental health services don’t “bend and break”.

“The lack of funding is unbelievable. You will get people admitted as an emergency and the only bed available for them is 200 miles away. And these people are perhaps psychotic, so being taken to somewhere they don’t know, and looked after by people they don’t know, is not going to be very helpful to their recovery. In community mental health, you get community psychiatric nurses who have got hundreds of patients on their caseload; how are they supposed to spend quality time with all of them? They can’t possibly do it. And they burn themselves out and they leave. It’s tragic, really.”

Improved investment in the wider social fabric is also needed to promote good mental health, she argues. “One of the biggest risk factors for mental health is social isolation, so now where do people go for that community? Where do they go to socialise when you are cutting all these services in the community?”

For Cannon, the stress she experienced in general medicine evaporated when she joined a psychiatric team. It felt like “coming home”, she says. “I felt truly useful for the first time in my life.”

Working with mental health patients was also the inspiration for her novel, which is about prejudice towards people who are a little bit different. It took just nine months to complete – a feat accomplished by writing at 4am before her shifts began and in NHS car parks during lunch breaks – and has sold more than 100,000 paperback copies in the UK.

She secured a six-figure deal for her second novel, due out next January, and will be working on her third when not volunteering in her old professional stomping ground. “Every day in psychiatry I felt as though I’d made a difference to somebody, I’d made them feel a little bit better about life – and I miss that feeling,” she says of her decision to return to the NHS. “It’s not at all altruistic me going back on to the wards because I get as much benefit out of it as they hopefully will get out of me. I love the people, I love hearing the stories, I love the teamwork. Writing is very isolating sometimes. I miss the camaraderie of being on the wards and of being with a team.”

Has she kept the door open to being a doctor again? “I would never say never, but if I could do this,volunteer and do my writing, that would be perfect – the best of both worlds.”

Curriculum Vitae

Age: 40s.

Lives: Ashbourne, Derbyshire.

Education: Denstone College, Uttoxeter; University of Leicester Medical School (graduated 2010 with a degree in medicine).

Career: 2014-present: author, 2010-2014: NHS doctor specialising in psychiatry, South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS foundation trust; bar maid, kennel maid, pizza delivery expert.

Public life: Volunteer, Arts for Health (South Staffordshire & Shropshire Healthcare NHS foundation trust)

Interests: Reading, walking my dog through the fields, medical humanities, the bridge between art and science.

The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is published by Harper Collins (£7.99). To order a copy for £6.15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846

Author Joanna Cannon: why I’m going back to the psychiatric wards

The New York Occasions Meals Author Who Is Always Out To Lunch

Does New York Occasions meals writer Mark Bittman get anything right?  I doubt it.  I after tried his recipe for challenging-boiled eggs and the yolks have been runny.

I ate the eggs anyway, but Bittman’s pronouncements about policy are significantly less palatable, and I’m afraid that some credulous readers really swallow them.  His latest commentary, “Leave Natural Out of It,” is yet another hash of uninformed opinions and misinformation.

It is tedious to deconstruct a Bittman column simply because there is constantly so much incorrect with it, but let’s deal with a number of misapprehensions and misrepresentations.

O  Bittman does seem to be to have backed down from his rabid antagonism toward crops genetically engineered with the most present day, precise and predictable tactics.  He now concedes grudgingly that they “are probably harmless” and that “the engineering itself is not even a little bit nervous making.”  (This building, from a skilled wordsmith?)  In reality, right after far more than four billion acres planted around the world and far more than 3 trillion meals containing genetically engineered substances consumed in North America alone, there has not been a single ecosystem disrupted or a tummy ache confirmed.  (Couldn’t we get rid of the probably, Mark?)

Leading: Lesser cornstalk borer larvae extensively damaged the leaves of this unprotected peanut plant. (Picture Number K8664-2)-Photograph by Herb Pilcher. Bottom: Following only a number of bites of peanut leaves of this genetically engineered plant (containing the genes of the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacteria), this lesser cornstalk borer larva crawled off the leaf and died. (Picture Quantity K8664-1)-Photo by Herb Pilcher. (Photograph credit score: Wikipedia)

O  “[T]o date G.M.O.’s [genetically modified organisms] have been utilized by companies like Monsanto to maximize revenue and more getting rid of [sic] the accumulated knowledge of generations of farmers from agriculture.”  And how, specifically, is this distinct from the organizations that make implements like tractors, combines and farm-management software, that have modernized farming practices and produced them a lot more worthwhile?

O  Large agribusiness companies using the new methods “have not been effective in moving sustainable agriculture forward (which is related since that was their claim).”  The evidence argues otherwise.  By enhancing weed manage and decreasing the want for plowing, genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant crops allow a lot of farmers to adopt and maintain no- or reduced-tillage manufacturing programs, which final results in important reductions in greenhouse gasoline emissions.

According to a current complete examination, “Based on cost savings arising from the quick adoption of no-till/reduced tillage farming systems in North and South America, an further six,706 million kg of soil carbon is estimated to have been sequestered in 2012 (equivalent to 24,613 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that has not been launched into the global atmosphere).”

Equally essential, the higher yields and drought resistance of some genetically engineered crops make them a lot more sustainable than standard crops and, particularly, than organically grown ones.  As discussed under, natural agriculture is the scourge of sustainability.

O  Bittman retreats into the deepest, darkest recesses of his parallel universe with his allusion to the “intensive and nearly unregulated use of…agricultural chemical compounds.”  In reality, agricultural chemical substances are subject to some of the most stultifying, burdensome, expansive and high-priced regulation on the planet, courtesy of the relentlessly risk-averse Environmental Safety Agency.  (Isn’t there an editor who reads Bittman’s copy prior to it’s published?)

Lastly, we come to Bittman’s continuing slavish and uncritical devotion to natural agriculture: “Eating natural meals is unquestionably a greater choice than consuming nonorganic foods at this point, even so, it’s a privilege” [italics in unique].  That is unquestionably nothing at all a lot more than silly, sentimental twaddle, specifically in see of a 2012 research by researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Health Policy published in the Annals of Internal Medication.  They carried out a meta-examination in which outcomes from the scientific literature had been combined.  Data from 237 studies were aggregated and analyzed to figure out whether or not organic foods are safer or more healthy than non-organic meals.  The researchers concluded that fruits and veggies that met the criteria for “organic” have been on regular no much more nutritious than their far less costly traditional counterparts, nor had been people meals much less most likely to be contaminated by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or Salmonella.  In addition, even though non-natural fruits and veggies did have higher pesticide residues, a lot more than 99 % of the time the amounts were beneath the permissible, extremely conservative safety limits set by federal regulators.

Bittman’s phobia about chemical pesticides in agriculture is so, well, jejune.  The huge bulk of pesticidal substances that we consume occur in our diet plans “naturally,” and they are existing in natural foods as nicely as conventional ones.  In a landmark investigation post published in the Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues discovered that “99.99 % (by excess weight) of the pesticides in the American diet regime are chemical compounds that plants make to defend themselves.  Only 52 natural pesticides have been examined in substantial-dose animal cancer exams, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens these 27 are shown to be current in many widespread food items.”

The bottom line of Ames’ experiments: “Natural and synthetic chemical compounds are equally very likely to be positive in animal cancer exams.  We also conclude that at the reduced doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.”

In other phrases, consumers who purchase overpriced natural meals in buy to steer clear of pesticide publicity are focusing their focus on .01% of the pesticides they consume.

Contrary to Bittman’s views, if you care about the atmosphere, eating organic food is much more of a sacrilege than a privilege.  Natural farms generate far much less foods per unit of land and water than conventional ones.  The reduced yields of organic agriculture — normally 20%-50% lower than conventional agriculture — impose different stresses on farmland and especially on water consumption.

The New York Occasions Meals Author Who Is Always Out To Lunch