Down the Drain: A Commentary on Societys Shift
Contents:
Natural rhythms
Now, psychologists are gaining a better understanding of how exactly night and shift work affect cognitive performance and which interventions and policies could keep shift workers and the public safer. Learning healthy sleeping practices is "just as important as occupational training," he says. Poor scheduling, combined with unhealthy attitudes about the need for sleep, can cause major problems for night workers.
Our bodies and brains evolved to relax and cool down after dark and to spring back into action come morning. But that seesaw scheduling approach is a doubly bad idea, says John Violanti, PhD, an organizational psychologist who was a New York state trooper for 23 years. Also, many officers seek night shifts to get overtime pay, he says. Fatigue, in turn, worsens moods, decreases cognitive abilities and reflexes, and makes people more vulnerable to disease, says Vila. Neither is it safe for more routine activities, such as driving.
Night work and fatigue may also contribute to the risk of heart disease and cancer, according to research by Violanti, Vila and colleagues Policing , Vol. Working with 98 Buffalo, N. They found that the officers who most frequently worked the 8 p. Those who commonly worked that shift and also averaged fewer than six hours of sleep were four times more likely than other officers to have metabolic syndrome.
We will have to have decarbonised transport and energy production, white roofs , gardens in every empty lot, full-capture recycling, and all the rest of the technologies of sustainability we are already developing.
The emphasis on measurement as the core of demography is paramount in one of the key textbooks in demography produced in the new millennium. Section of the Swiss Criminal Code says that anyone who acts on selfish motives to assist someone to kill themselves can be punished with up to five years in jail. When this fails, "We are ready to help them in the other direction. She warns them that the drink will be bitter, and some people choose to neutralise the taste with a chocolate. With life expectancy growing and medical sophistication improving, people are increasingly worried about whether they will be "condemned to linger on", Minelli says, "forced to end their lives in an institution.
That includes technologies we call law and justice — the system software, so to speak. Income adequacy and progressive taxation keep the poorest and richest from damaging the biosphere in the ways that extreme poverty or wealth do. Peace, justice, equality and the rule of law are all necessary survival strategies. Meanwhile, cities will always rely on landscapes much vaster than their own footprints. Those areas will be working for us in their own way, as part of the health-giving context of any sustainable civilisation. And all the land has to be surrounded by oceans that, similarly, are left partly unfished.
All this can be done. All this needs to be done if we are to make it through the emergency centuries we face and create a civilised permaculture, something we can pass along to the future generations as a good home. There is no alternative way; there is no planet B. We have only this planet, and have to fit our species into the energy flows of its biosphere. This week, the Overstretched Cities series examines the impact of the rush to urbanisation, which has seen cities around the world explode in size.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here. Topics Cities Overstretched cities. Food Farming Agriculture comment. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. On more than one occasion she has helped people return home who have changed their mind.
The first stage happens at a round table, covered with a yellow tablecloth, where the two Dignitas companions sit with family members and the individual who is about to die to discuss the procedure. At this stage, a lot of documents must be signed setting out the desire to die.
It is up to the members to decide when they are ready to take an anti-vomiting drug to prepare the stomach, and half an hour later, the lethal drug. You must tell me when it is time for me to prepare the drugs,'" Bucher says. We are servants of their desire for self-determination. Bucher stays with the family and goes through the documents.
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- Inside the Dignitas house.
Sometimes the person who is going to die will appear to be angry and quite bossy, and tell me to hurry up, but I know it is not how they are feeling inside," she says. She has to judge when the time is right for both the person who wants to die, and their relatives. She came with her daughter who was perhaps The mother was very firm that she would go quickly and that it was not a problem. She told the daughter that she was not to cry and made her go and stand in the kitchen.
Inside the Dignitas house | Society | The Guardian
I had to explain that this is not the way, you should not tell your daughter she cannot cry," she says. Staff also suggest that relatives stay to witness the death, because they believe this helps with the mourning process. People are encouraged to lie down, because if they die sitting up at the table, their mouth drops open and their body slumps, and it is harder for the family to watch the process.
Most of them are in a lot of pain and they know that this drink will end it forever. The 15g of white powder is mixed with water and drunk from a small glass. Bucher advises people to say anything they need to say, their final words, before they drink, because after there is not much time — usually just between one to three minutes before they sleep, fall into a coma and then die. She warns them that the drink will be bitter, and some people choose to neutralise the taste with a chocolate. There is no pain. It's like before an operation — they feel woozy," she says.
It was very strained. But after she drank, she took them in her arms and said 'I love you, you are my best ones,'" Bucher says, still moved by the memory.
They said it was the first time she had hugged them like that. That was a good moment for me — it was not too late for her to show how she felt. As soon as the person dies, the undertakers and police are called.
In a side room, there is a television for the police to watch the video, so they can file a report. Upstairs, there is a washing machine, and a box with some folded clothes and shoes belonging to recently dead people, ready to be dispatched to the Red Cross. Minelli has delegated much of the organisation of Dignitas to his staff of 10 part-time workers.
He checks the files, and notes that one English person is booked in to die this week, but otherwise there is an unexpected lull in appointments.
Introduction
Bucher puts it down to the Indian summer most of Europe has experienced, and predicts that things will get a bit busier in the run up to Christmas. Minelli meets people here occasionally to discuss their desire to die, but mostly his work is concentrated on the court cases and campaigning. Back at his house, where he lives alone, he describes with enthusiasm a new technique for painless death he is experimenting with; one which uses a chemical that is easily available without the need for a doctor's prescription.
He requests that we do not publish details of the chemical or the technique, to prevent it becoming more widely used. The method can be administered easily by staff, and using this he could circumvent using doctors altogether. He struggles with hanging on to doctors, just as he struggles with keeping apartments; most are nervous about co-operating with Dignitas for fear of losing their licence.
Minelli says he does not pay himself a salary, and remarks, "I have made a lot of debt in order to maintain Dignitas. An estranged colleague, Soraya Wernli, who worked for several years helping with the suicides, lost faith in the organisation and told the police around five years ago that Minelli was making money from death and the fear of it, and criticised him for running "a production line concerned only with profits".
Police investigations found nothing suspicious. Minelli's novelist daughter Michele, who has arrived to visit her father, remarks that she and her sister will have no inheritance when her father dies because everything has been spent on his campaigning work. She was wounded by Wernli's allegations, more sensitive to criticism of her father than he is on his own behalf. Disturbed by the claims, she offered to help him gather feedback from the relatives of people who have died, and now she is responsible for sending out forms and compiling responses.
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The overwhelmingly positive replies have reassured her, and she collects a few from the pile of new post and spreads them out over the worn red-checked tablecloth. One person, from Britain who recently came to witness a relative's death, describes the process as a "calm day filled with the deepest sorrow I have ever felt", before thanking Dignitas for its assistance. Another person who also travelled earlier in the autumn from Britain says the experience was "a time of sadness, naturally, but also of peace, calmness, spiritual comfort in a relaxed, compassionate, unhurried atmosphere".
The doorbell rings again and it is the Greek woman back again with her uncle and a translator who she has managed to find somewhere in the city. This time, Minelli invites her in; they sit in the main room out of sight but her anguished voice can be heard clearly. As it becomes clear that he will not help her to die, she begins shouting: After almost an hour or so they leave, promising to return from Greece with more documents in the spring.
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Minelli explains that she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is determined to die. Whether he will be able to help depends on whether a Greek psychiatrist can write a letter that says she is capable of rational thought. He is despondent at the desperate steps that people are forced to take in their search for a painless death, steps which he compares with the measures women once had to take if they wanted an abortion. He hopes that she will reconsider, and happily recounts stories of other applicants who have been persuaded to change their minds.
When the depressed young German man arrived on his doorstep some years ago, demanding to die immediately, Minelli felt sorry for him, took him in, and spent a day or so explaining why suicide was not the answer. On the third morning, when the young man said once again that he wanted to die, Minelli took a new approach, telling him: