What our columnists had to say in our inaugural year about the challenges that face society From love to death, and everything in between, the HealthSupplement's commentators expressed their views on all facets of daily life
Without love
When we stop being lovers, we start being destructive. The less we love, the less we are human. We become takers and users and succumb to a lack of intelligence. We deny all of who we are.
- Shalini Sinha
Work
Autonomy in decision-making, time for recovery and encouragement to honour healthy disciplines that nourish and protect us can contribute to a better working environment.
- Tony Bates
Healthcare
These are sad days for Irish medicine. The grand ideas and strategies designed to provide us with a Rolls Royce-standard service are apparently incapable of fixing the nuts and bolts of the bicycle service we in fact possess. Hold your hats folks! The way things are going, we will all be walking soon.
- Maurice Neligan
Lifecycles
Understanding we are mortal means acknowledging that things will end. There is a limit. Our time is not indefinite. Things change, grow and ebb. Life is in movement.
- Shalini Sinha
Jealousy
The key to breaking the grip of jealousy is to catch it as it takes form in the mind and take some constructive action.
- Tony Bates
Misery
We are all vicarious voyeuristic victims, technological intruders and consumers of the minutiae of misery all over the world on our screens, in our ears, in the immediacy of this information age. And it is making us miserable, excavating our atavism, increasing our pessimism and shaking sacred certainties in the concept of civilisation.
- Marie Murray
Faith
Our religions have traditionally connected the concept of "faith" with that of "submission". As a result, we have developed a myth that having faith is somehow in contradiction to a person's independent thinking.
- Shalini Sinha
Job description
"Interestingly, when your appointment was announced, the then minister, Micheál Martin, was asked was it a good idea to have a doctor in such a post. Perhaps we should have a postman as chief of staff of the Defence Forces, or how about a nun in charge of the Bank of Ireland. Welcome home to the land where logic always takes second place."
- Maurice Neligan on the appointment of Adrian Halligan as head of the new Health Service Executive - he subsequently decided not to take up the post.
Suicide
However, simply talking about feelings of suicide involves no actual risk. Being unable to talk about it is very dangerous.
- Shalini Sinha
Suffering
Hope is a key factor research has identified as critical in determining how we negotiate suffering. If people believe that their suffering will end, or that some possibility of rescue is likely, they can endure incredible discomfort.
- Tony Bates
The private way
Make everybody a private patient through universal insurance, either by personal payment on the part of those who can afford it, and premiums paid by the State for those who cannot.
- Maurice Neligan
Integrity
It is only through our practices of facing and emerging from pain - being honest when it seems most difficult, demonstrating our willingness to give up all that we love for the good of others, reaching out when we feel most vulnerable - that we can attempt to grow a base of integrity.
- Shalini Sinha
Modern lifestyles
With all the ways our modern society encourages us to neglect our bodies, it seems the abuse of our nervous processes is most forcefully encouraged and simultaneously denied. Most of us take multiple hits of caffeine, nicotine or alcohol to stimulate or depress us in the name of relaxation, bravado or simply "functioning". However, coping, really coping, means facing struggle, not rejecting it.
- Shalini Sinha
Worry
Worry is a signal that we are not feeling safe in the world. Use it as your cue to take time to re-focus your attention on what really matters in your life. When you become grounded in the present you will find it easier to tolerate uncertainty, and trust in your capacity to deal with whatever the future holds in store for you.
- Tony Bates
Buying treatment
In my opinion the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) should not exist at all. It is a finger in the dyke exercise designed to prevent the public waiting lists from vanishing over the horizon.
- Maurice Neligan
Blame
Blame allows us to hand over responsibility, insisting that forward progress requires someone else's action. Whether or not we were responsible for the events of the past, however, does not change our ability to take charge in the future.
- Shalini Sinha
Secondary school
First day at secondary school may not have the front-cover cuteness of the first school day but these young people require our attention and understanding. Just because they cannot cry visibly does not mean that they are not scared inside.
- Marie Murray
Modern ethics
Perhaps the childhood dilemma of to tell or not to tell made its bi-directional way into the adult psyche so that ethical ineptitude ensued. Perhaps the message that emerged was to do is fine but to get caught a crime and to stay silent pragmatically preferable.
- Marie Murray
Medical students
In the hospital hierarchy, the medical student is the lowest form of life. One counted for nothing in the beginning other than being a nuisance and later when you became a resident student you were a source of initially incompetent but free labour. You were expected to know your place, keep out of the way and jump when ordered. Becoming quickly hospital-wise, we adapted as lesser organisms do, to ensure our survival.
- Maurice Neligan
Indifference
There is a line of reason and self-control that we can all cross in an effort to survive and belong. When we observe some obvious injustice in our workplace and walk on by, convincing ourselves it's unavoidable. Or when we condone situations that create harm to others, like war, isolation and extreme poverty, through our silence and passivity.
Our aim should be to put in place the necessary conditions to allow us to live out our higher aspirations and to question seriously our support for situations that make this virtually impossible.
- Tony Bates
Gossip
Gratuitous gossip is confessional calumny, the slaughter of reputations, the death of marriages and the trauma of social exclusion. It is indecent exposure of human vulnerability and frailty and too many clinicians see too many people whose lives have been wrenched by words.
- Marie Murray
The Leaving Cert
Because if the Leaving Cert is a gateway to success, it is too narrow for all, and many do fall in the annual rush for points and privileged places. Therefore, we must remember that knowledge in every discipline is now greater than any one person can possess.
The future is not about rote memory but about accessing and using knowledge wisely, discriminating the worthy from the trivial, deciding where one stands on issues, what ethical position one holds, what foothold in the avalanche of ideologies.
- Marie Murray
PC equality
Apropos dancing, a classmate reminded me of the tall girls' dance in the Ierne ballroom. If the male was over six feet, he got in for free. I suppose nowadays the vertically challenged would bring this outrageous discrimination before the Equality Authority.
- Maurice Neligan
Schizophrenia
Effective help for the individual with schizophrenia requires a holistic collaborative endeavour, where medical, psychological and social needs are identified and addressed through multidisciplinary teamwork. What is needed is a positive recovery plan tailored to the particular needs of individual sufferers and their families.
- Tony Bates