Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I’m so close to being done with the spring semester - just a few more papers to grade. I should have done them today, but I decided to watch an episode of The Crown with my wife. (To be fair, I spent most of the day preparing my summer course that starts tomorrow - it’s not like I’ve been sitting on these papers - I’ll get the papers done tomorrow.) My wife and I have been enjoying The Crown much more than I thought I would. I have always regarded the Royal Family as a sort of side-show anachronism. I still do. But The Crown is well done.
I said goodbye to my seniors on Thursday. These were the seniors whom I worked to place in internships for nearly six months during the height of COVID. They invited me to speak at their “banquet”, which ordinarily is an actual banquet, but due to COVID was a standing meeting under a tent with some pre-wrapped cookies. What I talked about mostly was their duty. I told them we had done what we could for them, but the real value of our program - and it was the same in many respects with Army-Baylor when I taught there, and it is the same in many successful programs - comes from the alumni. The alumni come back and speak to our classes, they do resume reviews, they do mock interviews, they arrange internships, and they hire new grads. What I told them was, as of Friday, they were no longer “the next generation”. Instead they would now join the ranks of alumni and it was their duty to return the favors they had been given the next “next generation”.
What I like about the Crown is that the main themes are duty, sacrifice, and service. The show manages to make these things seem like fresh ideas. These are things that seem to have been mostly forgotten, particularly in popular culture. Having served the first act of my adult life in the military, and now having the privilege to serve again, I am convinced that happiness, Jeffersonian happiness, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, is the only really meaningful happiness, and it can only be reached by finding something to serve. True happiness only comes from finding something greater than one’s self to serve. I say something, not someone. I hope my former students all find that thing in their lives as they leave to start the next leg of their respective journeys.
(picture is a line drawing I did after the banquet. Saying goodbye is always a lonely thing.)
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What: City Journal, The Invisible Asylum
https://www.city-journal.org/olympia-washington-mental-hospitals
Why: One of the things I hear from my colleagues in the field is how dire the mental health crisis is, not just here in New Hampshire, but across the country. New Hampshire was ground zero for the opioid crisis, and we are sorely lacking addiction treatment, especially inpatient addiction treatment (I did a podcast Chris DiNicola who is working on that issue and learned a lot from him about addiction). However, it is more than addiction treatment but care for acute mental health issues as well. There is a need for inpatient psychiatric treatment, but an insufficient number of beds, so people in psychiatric distress wind up waiting in emergency departments for days, even weeks, waiting for an admission to a facility. Anyone who has seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would never want to condemn someone to such vile treatment, and so deinstitutionalization sounds humane. Unfortunately it seems we have gone too far in the other direction.
This article looks at the mental health crisis in Olympia, WA, and how deinstitutionalization has really just been social abdication. From the article:
In the absence of the old asylums, Olympia’s mentally ill are now crowded into a city-sanctioned tent encampment, then shuffled through the institutions of the modern social-scientific state: the jail cell, the short-term psychiatric bed, the case-management appointment, the feeding line, and the needle dispensary. In the name of compassion, we have built a system that may be even crueler than what came before.
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Watch
What: Horrible Histories, Historical Hospital: Dr. Isis (3 min)
Why: I was looking for material for my Healthcare Systems class on the history of healthcare and stumbled across this series of very funny short videos that are skits of an actor pretending to be a period physician trying to practice medicine in a modern hospital. This one features a healer out of ancient Egypt. There are a bunch and three I watched were very funny!
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Listen
What: HBR IdeaCast, CEO Series: 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki on Scientific Breakthroughs and Public Trust
Why: Really interesting interview with the CEO of 23andMe. Some interesting (and politically tempered) discussion about their relationship with FDA regulators, and how the regulatory regime changed between presidencies (from Bush to Obama). I’ve never thought 23andMe should be regulated like a medical device. Also interesting is to listen to how Wojcicki has tried to position 23andMe differently from similar firms such as Ancestry.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)