The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Mechanic, philosopher and author of "The Case for Working with Your Hands" and "The World Beyond Your Head", Matthew Crawford, argues that a new frontier of capitalism has been opened (the attention economy), which seeks to dig up and monetize every bit of private headspace. With ever-increasing demands on our attention, how do we focus on what's important? The answer is to stop being passive consumers of manufactured experiences and become people who engage in skilled...
Two decades ago, a psychology student doing his training at one of Argentina's oldest psychiatric wards kept being asked by his family and friends what it was like to work in there. So he came up with an idea: to let the patients explain in their own words. The first radio station to broadcast from inside a mental hospital was born. Radio La Colifata - has been on air from Hospital Jose Borda in Buenos Aires for 23 years. The voices it includes are enough to make anyone in the mainstream...
Feeling ashamed for not being happier? On an endless quest to transform yourself?
Does our collective fixation with psychological and physical health actually verge on the pathological?
Leading academics Carl Cederström, André Spicer and Renata Salecl gather to explore how wellness has become an unhealthy obsession in western societies, and how living ‘well’ has become synonymous with being morally good.
They argue that visions of social change have been...
In their new book, "The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills," economist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu examine the health impacts of austerity across the globe. The authors estimate there have been more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression across Europe and the United States since governments started introducing austerity programs in the aftermath of the economic crisis. For example in Greece, where spending on public health has been...
Comedian, Ruby Wax knows knows depression well. Throughout the '80s and '90s, during a flourishing career as a brash comedian and interviewer in the UK, it trotted at her heels, even while she was interviewing the Duchess of York and sorting through Imelda Marcos' shoes. Diseases of the body garner sympathy, but the same can't be said for diseases of the brain - why is that? With dazzling energy and humor, Wax, diagnosed a decade ago with clinical depression, urges us to put an end to the...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa has some of the highest levels in the world of mental health disability and disease, with around one in five people affected. While popular belief holds that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, obsessive behaviours, depression, bipolar disorder and various phobias are caused solely by individual susceptibility to these maladies, the reality is rather more nuanced.
It appears that susceptible individuals are more likely to exhibit symptoms when stressed by personal or...
