info on research for Masters of Mental Health Sciences

In the process of signing up for the masters in mental health sciences.
Will be doing some research - found some info.
The research process
• Robert Dessaix. “Showing your Colours.” (and so forth). Sydney: Pan Macmillan/Picador (1998): 121-133.• Ann Game & Andrew Metcalfe. “Managing.” Passionate Sociology. London: Sage Publications (1996): 26-42.• Elspeth Probyn. “Writing Shame” [extract]. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales (2005): 129-43. (There is also a version of this chapter in The Affect Theory Reader!)
These readings were set when I inherited the course – although I am bringing them in a little earlier this year. They illustrate some issues in the research process that are worth highlighting from the outset, whether it is the terror of getting started, the pressure of living up to your research topic, or finding ways to stay motivated (especially when the profession can throw some tough breaks). Resilience is an asset that research students do well to acquire.
These articles also discuss anxieties about writing and the challenge of finding your “voice”. This is an issue that will come up again, I think, when we talk about writing and arguing in Week 5.
But there is an important subtitle I’ve added to the week’s outline for all of this discussion: “Habits, strategies and responsibilities.” It can be very confusing for students starting out in higher degrees to find a rhythm for their writing. Not only in terms of making their project seem important enough that they will dedicate significant amounts of time to it from Day One, but also learning to contextualise the project and not make it so all-consuming that it is the only thing in life.
Getting that balance right long term is really hard – maybe impossible! But one thing that helps is to recognise that the degree is an experience offered by an institution and that it has certain functions. The more you can learn about that institution, the easier time you will have recognising your own place in it – and the wider scheme of things.
What also helps in the writing process is to have an imagined reader. As a scholar, it is always wise to assume that it will not be a sympathetic one! But as was pointed out in class today, one of the most empowering reasons to write is in order to summon “a people to come”, if I am paraphrasing Deleuze correctly. So this is a matter of living with the tension of optimism versus cynicism and their variously mobilising qualities.
For my students, especially for the time being, their principal reader will be their supervisor – so it’s worth thinking carefully about the characteristics of this unique relationship, and how best to navigate it. This also relates to the previous point, because it is important for students to recognise the institutional pressures that working academics face if they are to get valuable and timely feedback.
I particularly welcome any anecdotes or relevant reading about the supervision relationship (or ‘advisor’ as it’s called in the US) from those following the discussion here.

Don't Stand on the Grass

Don’t Stand on the Grass
Fleur Finnie with Christine Mitchell – Vista Publications

Memoirs of early nursing in Melbourne.

What a tough life.
Born with physical disabilities and prominent red birth marks on her face Fleur did not have an easy childhood. Her father had an unstable temper which had a lasting impact for Fleur.
Fleur appears to have devoted her life to nursing and caring for others.
Her stories of life as a nursing assistant and her training are brutal and frank.
What was expected of nurses was to give over virtually all their time and also fund various activities i.e. brass cleaner for use on the wards and bananas for the specialist sandwiches.
They even had to cook a Sunday roast for the patients.
Nursing had a very hierarchical structure. It was about rules strictly adhered to.
Fleur managed to make her voice heard and had a determination to become a triple certificate nurse despite her disability, small stature and a condition of vomiting that went on for years.
She went on to become a nurse tutor leader.
What shines through this memoir is her absolute dedication to her work despite many hardships.

The Happy Life

The Happy Life
The search for contentment in the modern world – David Malouf

Malouf explores the concept of happiness throughout history. From early times to the writing of the Declaration of Independence to the pursuit of happiness in the 21st century, with all the pretense of attaining perfection and busyness of modern life.
The twenty first century pulse ‘…..endlessly pushing for the new, the more;’
Malouf espouses about humans being conditioned to being in a state of unrest. Curious and searching.
‘….restlessness is the source of all that is productive in our lives and is to this extent good, but in its negative sense it can be a source of anxiety that is deeply injurious.’
He describes man being both the happy child of progress, of the will to knowledge and power, and its endlessly unresting slave.
The concept of unrest seems to be the more you have, the more you desire more.
Consequently you are a slave to that desire for more.
Never satisfied, never ‘happy’.
Malouf explores the concept of living within defined limits and being able to feel completeness in this as being happy – even in the cruelest of conditions.
The perception of being isolated from the world leads to unhappiness as Malouf relates that there is a feeling expressed of being unknown, insignificant, worthless.
‘’What alarms us in our contemporary world, what unsettles and scares us, is the extent to which the forces that shape our lives are no longer personal – they no nothing of us; and to the extent that we know nothing of them – cannot put a face to them in anything we recognize as human – we cannot deal with them. We feel like small powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster, vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with.’
Malouf tackles this topic as an academic exercise concluding that it is best to try to live day by day. To ‘make do’ with a kind of happiness. I.e. don’t aim too high and it might be achievable. Setting limits to make a happy life achievable.
Is this the sound of reason and measured thinking of a mature individual, done with taking chances in life.
Is not happiness best found when you least expect it?

Everything here is so much

‘But because truly, being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.’
Rainer Maria Rilke

New MAC works first time!

Yeah, I am on the apple mac computer.

Takes me a while to mull over new machines.

The bigpond email system is wonderful.

However still doesn't have the instant addresses that make life so easy - will have to keep searching.

Finished Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd.

Quite addictive read, even if he didn't quite know how to end it.

Have managed to run out of gas in the middle of Adelaide, outside the Festival Theatre complex.

RAA to the rescue again. Car chews through the gas.

All for 45 minutes of Julia Guillard and the party faithful.

Imprints didn't have the book I wanted, will have to try Dymocks tomorrow.

Crickets, millipedes and spiders

Everywhere.
Familiar lethargy taking hold.
Garden expo?
Having trouble hearing in my right ear.
Visions of a warm and cosy bed appear.................
Utter devastion on TV again - this time Japan goes under.
It is heart wrenching stuff.
Pray for Japan.

Kiboshing expression

Day follows night.
Pancakes follow coffee
Sleep drifts by
Not much construction and imagination tonight
Worry puts the kibosh on expression

Frazzling

Frazzled by my body clock, weary of the 6am wake ups NO!
Frzzling alot.
Gloriously cool now.
Reading Exposure - an SA Author - although I think he is a Melbournite now.