Conversion Disorder (Part Two)

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Content warning: all manner of stress!

This is part two in a series. Press here for part one.

It's been a rough day and you're coming home from work. The phone call you just had didn't help either. You can feel it coming. All your muscles are tense and feel like they can burst at any second. All you hope for is that you just can make it through your front door before it happens, but walking is slow. After almost falling over a few times and using all manner of things as support you finally get inside and close your door and breathe a brief sigh of relief. You at least made it home.

You start trying to take off your jacket, but your arms seem to have their own ideas. Realising that any attempt at taking your clothes off is hopeless you instead focus on trying to sit down, before suddenly feel you self moving towards the wall beside you, hitting it harder than you hoped for. All of your body is now screaming inside and you are flown to the floor, knocking the air out of you. Your body has started writhing, your limbs twisting into bizarre shapes. All of it painful. And you can do nothing.

For half an hour you're down there on your hallway floor, trying to collect your thoughs as your whole body aches and moves in strange ways. I'm not in danger, you think to yourself. I might have a few bruises later, but this can't seriously hurt me. It's true, but a cold comfort. When things settle down you lie still for a minute, taking deep breaths. You still hurt, but not as bad as before. Sweat runs down your neck and you discover that you're drenched in it, so you decide to get up and undress. Drained of energy, you wont get much done tonight, you know that much. Things always feel strangely anti-climactic and awkward afterwards. You have no idea what should happen, but now things are just back to normal. Time to get on with the evening then.

The above story is an attempt at showing a non-epileptic sezuire. It's of course not an exhaustive explaination. Everyone experience it differently and in different situations. Welcome to part two of my little text on conversion disorder!

You might have seen conversion disorder more than you know. As I wrote before, it's more common than you think. You might even recognise some of your own experiences in this. That time you were really stressed, maybe even burnt out, didn't you feel some of this? If not, I'm happy for you. Functional symtoms are not uncommon when dealing with stress. To be clear, it's also common to not experience these symptoms.

They're not all conversion disorder though. For that it has to be something close to the body's standard reaction to stress, which can be rather annoying. But you might have seen it in other places as well, such as in the form of a thing called shell shock. It's a part of any war, but it was seen to a great extent during and after World War 1, with many soldiers reacting strangely to primarily artillery barrages. Taking cover in trenches with bombs landing all round they could be hit any second and all they could do is stay put and hope they wont get hit. This could go on for hours. Even when safe they could stare into the distance for long periods of time, become very irritable, have trouble sleeping, having trouble walking, experience unwanted tremors and movements and things like that. Now, some of that is what we today would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but some of it is conversion disorder. It can even be seen in the miniseries Band of Brothers set during World War 2. In the third episode we get to follow a soldier who during a battle a suddenly becomes blind without sustaining any injury. The medic diagnoses it as hysterical blindness, which sound eerily like something we've talked about. And hey, if you have any more potential pop cultural and historical depictions, please let me know!

You might be wondering now how you even get this. Or perhaps you have a good guess after the last paragraph. The cause is always some form of distress or trauma. It can be combat, sexual, harassment, physical injury or basically anything that can cause a large amount of stress. And while the precise workings of this are still unknown (at least to me at the time of writing, and I'm not a professional. I'm a patient) we do know that adrenaline and the fight/flight/freeze response plays a major part in this. So when we who suffer from this experience an episode, attack or what ever you want to call it, we get a huge boost of adrenaline that messes up how our brain functions. So to be clear: this is not something the patient is making up. This is a bug in how humans are programmed.

In my case I got conversion disorder when I was around twenty years old. Up until that time I had lived with Asperger's syndrome, depression and social anxiety my whole life without knowing (fun fact: I got all four diagnoses at the same), leaving me a very stressed individual, very keen on fitting in and working my ass off to ”make it”. I burned out and kept going anyway, not listening to my body's signals at all until my body quite literally made me unable to do anything.

But after first hearing that the problem was that I have short muscles (I don't), then that I probably have multiple sclerosis (that was a fun day), and being tested for all kinds of neurological disorders (needles in spines can be uncomfortable) the neurologists settled on saying ”bye!” and I just lucked out (or ”lucked in”, depending on where you live in the world) in getting the diagnosis from somewhere else and met a doctor in a third place that just happened to be specialiced in fuctional disorders. From her I could understand a bit of what was going on with me.

It's not all doom and gloom though. The absolute majority of people who get a diagnosis and treatment become healthy again in just a few weeks. So that's great! But yeah, I'm not one of them. All cases could potentially get cured, but a few things are needed for that (just to give you an idea. Don't use this list as treatment):

1. Recognise the severity of the issue and that the patient is not making this up. Could be done with decency and just listening.

2. Get to the source of the stress. Recognise what triggers the symptoms. Might require some form of deep psychology, such as psychodynamic therapy.

3. Work out new and more healthy reactions to the triggers. Might require something like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to adjust unconscious behaivours.

This is simplified, of course, maybe to the point of being incorrect for some patients. But one problem with this is that deep psychology is often frowned upon by healthcare today, mainly just because CBT is more effective, and therefor cheaper per patient and better for the general mental health of society. But CBT can't do everything deep psychological therapies can do, leaving many people behind. So number 2 in the steps above can become really hard to achieve if you're not willing to pay for it yourself (it's not cheap). I've even had the public health care tell me this, that they can't offer me this treatment (like they could not many years ago).

How I spend my time is learning to do things without it causing too much stress, trying to dig into my own brain (figuratively, ahem) to find out the precise triggers of my symptoms, and sometimes still pushing myself too hard in an effort to do fun things or have a job. I've made a lot of progress (and my wife has been extremely helpful in this), but there's still a lot of bad thoughts and habits to unravel in order to understand how I work and find the exact cause of this.

So to sum up: many people experience functional symptoms some time in their lives. A few people even have conversion disorder where your brain is convinced these functional symptoms are good, standard reactions to stress. Living with it is very disabling. And, well, I have conversion disorder and I've had it for over ten years now. And most importantly, now you know what it is! That's mission succesful for me.

So take care of yourselves and of each other. Stress is much more harmful than people realize.

Love you

Bye!

Konversionssyndrom (del ett)

English version can be found here.

Innehållsvarning: beskrivningar av stressfulla situationer

Tänk dig att du är på jobbet och har en okej, men inte fantastisk dag. Du sköter ditt och en kollega säger något som slår lite väl hårt. Du vet att du borde ignorera det, skaka av dig det, och på en bättre dag hade du kunnat det. Kommentaren var inte direkt elak eller så, och personen menade antagligen inget med det, men den gjorde dig lite ledsen. Du fortsätter jobba oavsett och ser fram emot att komma hem sedan och koppla av.

När du fortsätter jobba börjar din kropp kännas lite trög och något börjar hända med din syn. Allting ser likadant ut, men det känns långt bort på något vis. Ett glas vatten kanske skulle göra gott, tänker du och börjar gå för att skaffa dig ett. Men att gå runt på din arbetsplats verkar så främmande för dig nu. Allting har förvandlats till en lång tunnel och luften till lera.

På något sätt lyckas du ta dig till köket och häller upp ett glas vatten, men du kan knappt greppa det. Av rädsla att tappa det ställer du ner det på bänken och börjar titta på din hand som du försöker göra till en knytnäve, men inget händer.

”Är du okej?”, du vänder dig om för att svara en annan kollega som står bredvid dig, men du bara stirrar på henne i förvirring medan inga ord kommer ur din mun. Det är först nu du inser att den tröga känslan är att dina ben inte kan bära dig längre, så du sjunker ner på knä för att undvika att slå dig själv. Du känner din kollegas händer på dig och hon låter orolig, men allt du tänker på är hur att bara sitta upp är för mycket, så du börjar glida ner mot golvet tills du ligger ner.

Du kan fortfarande titta, röra dina ögon och du andas fortfarande, men du försöker flytta dina armar och ben utan respons. Rösterna runt dig är fortfarande tydliga, men allt känns overkligt. Din chef skyndar över till dig och går ner på knä vid dig.

”Blinka två gånger för mig”, säger han. Du gör så, tacksam i att upptäcka att du fortfarande kan.

”Ska vi ringa ambulans? Blinka en gång för 'ja', två gånger för 'nej'”. Du blinkar två gånger, glad att du bestämde dig för att ha det samtalet med honom. Men nu är du fast här en stund framöver, utan att kunna göra någonting.

Jag har konversionssyndrom. Du har antagligen aldrig hört talas om det innan, så jag tänkte att vi kan prata en stund om det. Diagnosen är ganska ovanlig, men symtomen är antagligen vanligare än vad du tror och tillståndet är förmodligen underdiagnostiserat. Den korta historian ovan är ett exempel på hur mina symtom kan se ut. De här är inte alla mina symtom och det finns fler. Symtomen vi kan se ovan är:

• Dissociation, den overkliga, långt borta, och främmande känslan. Den beskrivs även ibland som att titta på en video av sitt eget liv

• Funktionell afasi, oförmågan att behandla språk i hjärnan. Och funktionell betyder att det inte är något fysiskt fel med hjärnan då orsaken är psykologisk.

• Paralys i nästan hela kroppen, vilket betyder att du inte kan röra på dig.

Jag tänker försöka att inte använda för mycket medicinskt språk, för det riskerar att tappa er underbara människor, läsarna. Jag vill att ni ska få lite förståelse för hur det kan vara att leva med det här, inte att alla ska bli experter. Men lite språkbruk är nödvändigt, så ajg hoppas att ni kan stå ut med det.

Bra att veta: allt jag beskriver här är funktionellt. Det betyder att trots att symtomen är somatiska, som betyder ungefär ”av kroppen”, så är orsaken inte det, utan psykologisk. Andra ord ni kan ha hört om det är psykosomatisk och hysterisk. (Ja, jag är hysterisk!)

Andra symtom jag upplever är konstant smärta, icke-epileptiska anfall och mindre ofrivilliga rörelser, skakningar och ljud, försämrad koordination (ataxi), svårigheter att svälja (dysfagi), svaghet i kroppen som inte är hel paralys, och oförmåga att producera ljud med min röst (afoni, till skillnad från afasi). Ja, och paralys påverkar inte alltid hela kroppen, det kan vara bara delar av den. Jag har ätit många måltider med andra människor där jag bara har använd en arm, vilket har skockerat middagssälskapet när jag förklarat vad som pågår.

Vissa symtom andra med det här tillståndet kan uppleva är svimning, domningar, stickningar, dubbelseende, blindhet, dövhet, och även hallucinationer. Tja, jag är glad att det inte är jag!

Så det här är ganska intensiva grejer. Om du har bjudit in mig till ett evenemang och min dag inte är den bästa så hoppas jag att du finner i ditt hjärta förmågan att förlåta mig.

Hur som helst, det var del ett! Här ville jag introducera er för tillståndet för att ge er lite av en aning vad det kan handla om. Håll ögonen öppna för nästa gång då vi ska utforska mer hur det kan vara att leva med och vilka som kan få det. Spännande grejer!

Länk till del två!

Conversion Disorder (Part One)

Svensk version hittar du här.

Content warning: depictions of stressful situations

Imagine you're at work and you're having an okay, but not great day. You're going about your business and a colleague says something that hits a little too close to home. You know you should just ignore it, shake it off, and maybe on a better day you could. The comment wasn't directly mean or anything, and the person probably didn't mean anything by it, but it makes you just a little bit sad. You continue to work regardless, looking forward to coming home later and just relax.

As you're working you start feeling a bit sluggish and something happens to your vision. Everything looks the same, it just feels distant somehow. Perhaps a drink of water would do some good, you think and start walking to get a glass of water. But walking along in your workplace seems so alien to you now. Everything has turned into a long tunnel and the air has turned into sludge.

Somehow you manage to get to the kitchen and get a glass of water, but your barely able to grasp it. Afraid of dropping it you put it down on the counter and start looking at your hand while you try to make a fist and nothing happens.

”Are you alright?”, you turn to answer another colleague standing next to you, but you just stare at her in confusion with no words coming out of your mouth. It's just now that you realise that the sludge like feeling is your legs not being able to support you any longer, so you sink down to your knees trying to avoid hurting yourself. You feel your colleague's hands on you and she sounds worried, but all you're thinking about is how even sitting up is too much, so you start sliding down on the floor untill you're lying down.

You can still see and move eyes and you're still breathing, but you try move your arms and legs with no response. The voices around you are still clear, but everything still feels unreal. Your boss comes running over and kneels down in front of you.

”Blink two times for me”, he says. You do, thankful to discover you still can.

”Should we call an ambulance? One blink for 'yes', two for 'no'”. You blink two times, happy you decided to have that talk with him. But now you're stuck here for a while, unable to do anything.

I have conversion disorder. You likely have not heard of it before, so I thought we can talk a bit about it. The diagnosis is rather rare, but the symptoms can be more common than you think and the disorder is likely underdiagnosed. The short story above is an example of how some of my symptoms might look. These are not all of my symptoms and there are plently of other ones. The symptoms we can see above are:

• Dissociation, the unreal, distant, or alien feeling i described. It's also sometimes described as watching a video of your own life.

• Functional aphasia, the inability to work language in your brain, with functional meaning that there's not something physically wrong with your brain, and the cause is psychological.

• Paralysis of almost the entire body, meaning you can't move.

I'm going to try to not use too much medical language, because it risks losing you lovely people, the readers. I want you to gain some understanding of how it can be to live with this, not for everyone to become experts. But some use of lingo is inevitable, so bear with me.

Good to know: everything I explain here is functional. That means that while the symptoms are somatic, meaing roughly ”of the body”, the cause is not, but rather psychological. Other words for this you might have heard are psychosomatic and hysterical. (Yes, I'm hysterical!)

Other symptoms I experience are constant pain, non-epileptic seizures and lesser involuntary movements, tremors and sounds, impared coordination (ataxia), difficulty swallowing (dysphagia), weakness that's not total paralysis, and not being able to make sounds with my voice (aphonia, as opposed to aphasia). Oh, and paralysis doesn't always affect my whole body, it can be just parts of it. I've eaten plently of meals with other people only using one arm, leaving my dinner company in chock when I explain what's going on.

Some symptoms others with this condition might experience are fainting, numbness, tingling sensations, double vision, blindness, deafness and even hallucinations. Well, I'm happy that's not me!

So this is some intense stuff. If you have invited me to a fun event and I'm not having the best day, I hope you'll find in in your heart to forgive me for not going.

Anyway, that's it for part one! In it I wanted to introduce you to the condition, just give you an idea of what it is. Stay tuned for next time where we will explore more of how it is to live with and who might get it. Exiting stuff!

Link to part two!

An Autumn of Writing

After a long pause from online presence, the Youtuber Ze Frank came back. He already had a following, an audience who wanted more as was very exited for his return. His first video? It was about how scared he was to do this and how to handle those emotions¹. Back in 2012 I watched that video and it stuck with me. It's still something I think about whenever I want to create something. This already succesful creator was scared and unsure of himself. It seems like the only difference between success and failure is that succesful creators know what to do with those emotions.

So, taking inspiration from another creator, CGP Grey², this in my Autumn of Writing. I'm not setting a goal for me to fail at. This is a theme, not something I even can fail. This autumn I want my creative energies to be directed towards writing. Perhaps I'll even make a habit of it and keep doing it, but it's okay if that doesn't happen. I'm not going to write every day. When I do write, it won't always be for this blog. I'm not going to write about anything in particular or in any one format. But I am sticking to my theme, so I'm writing whatever I want!

So what's this blog about? I see this as a space for me to practice writing and publish whatever I want other people to think about, or maybe just something about me I want to share. I like thinking about politics, health issues, history and science among other things, so maybe I'll write more about all those things. This is not always going to be totally accurate with sources cited, and definitely not peer reviewed! This is just a place for my thoughts, sometimes well researched, sometimes not. But I don't like the idea of spreading false information, so I do strive to have my facts straight.

Next up I plan on writing a bit about my health and some things that are diffcult for me. Self centered? Hell yes! But I suffer from a condition more people need to be aware about. Best case scenario, perhaps I even manage to reach someone suffering from it without knowing. What can this mysterious condition be? Stay tuned for next time!

Hope you have a nice day!

1 An Invocation for Beginnings by Ze Frank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYlCVwxoL_g

2 Your Theme by CGP Grey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE

A Quick Test about Politicians

I would like you to do something for me, if that's alright. I would like you to think of different current political leaders, both those you like and those you dislike. Then I want you to go through the list here below and consider whether they fit the description of any of the points. It can be good to examine them more objectively from time to time. And hey, it's just a fun little experiment. Is that okay with you? If yes, keep reading. Anyway, here it is, yes or no answers:

1. Do they focus heavily on tradition, in that we must preserve it or perhaps learn from it to better lead our lives?
2. Do they dislike many aspects of modern society, and perhaps even state that our society is in decline and has been for a long time?
3. Do they like to take action and perhaps don't factor in as much if that action is based on science or other intellectual thinking?
4. Do they dislike people disagreeing with them, perhaps to the point of even trying to hinder any criticism thrown their way?
5. Do they often point to a group of people, blaming them for the faults of society?
6. Do the appeal a lot to a middle class who might be struggling or are afraid of something changing in society?
7. Do they talk about a group of people working in secret to make society worse?
8. Do they talk about their opponents as sometimes strong and a great threat and sometimes weak and feeble?
9. Do they talk about there always being a fight or war (doesn't have to be an actual war) going on, or perhaps how we must always be ready for one?
10. Do they dislike weakness or weak individuals, and perhaps regard their own group as stronger than most?
11. Do they talk about being ready to sacrifice or even perhaps to die for their beliefs?
12. Do they often present themselves as tough or strong, or perhaps believe men and women have certain roles in society?
13. Do they talk about how the people has a strong will and do they often present themselves as speaking for the people?
14. Do they often use a simpler or more easily understood form of speaking compared to their opponents?

If the answers are some ”yes”, but mostly ”no”, then no worries. Most politicians fit some if these. If pretty much all were ”yes” then I have some bad news. But don't worry and please be honest with yourself. People who fit these desciptions are usually very good at fooling others into believeing their view of the world is the one and true, and yes, you might have been fooled. If so you now stand in front of a choice: do you double down on your convictions, or do you start questioning what you've been told? The thing is, the list you just read, this is Umberto Eco's list of the fourteen properties of fascism.

Coronavirus and Sweden

I want to talk about the Swedish method of fighting the Coronavirus, as there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on the subject, a lot of misinformation being said.

Here are some disclaimers: Please note that I'm not a biologist, a medical professional, some other form of expert, or any other relevant description. I am merely a concerned citizen. The information in this article is relevant for July 2020. In fact with me not being an expert and all this might be outdated even now! This might also be a sensitive subject for some as death is a scary subject and the sheer scale of this outbreak gets to people. If you fear this might be too much, I'd advise you not to read further. Oh, and whenever I say ”Sweden” here, I usually refer to the Public Health Agency of Sweden (PHA), but I think you'll get it.

So what's being said? On both news and social media I read a lot about how Sweden has botched preventing the spread of the virus, how they have totally failed protecting the people, how people are dying everywhere here, and how no one here seems to care or do anything about it. Countries are closing their borders to us specifically and many people regard Sweden as one of the more worse off places when it comes to Covid-19.

This is a bit frustrating because not a lot of that is actually true and I will attempt to adress some of these issues in this article.

As I stated: I'm no expert. But I have been listening to experts on this since this started and I do believe I have a good layman's grasp on this to talk about it while no one is thinking of this as gospel. So take my words with a good pinch of salt.

Prevention

So did Sweden fail in preventing the spread of the virus? I mean, kinda, but everyone did. Perhaps that's not the best question to ask, so let's try another one to get to the core of the issue: did Sweden do too little to prevent or limit the spread of the virus?

Early on Sweden tried, like everyone else, to track the spread of every case and quarantine those individuals to stop the spread that way. I don't know if you remember, but around that time we all found out that many infected were asymtomatic, meaning there was no sign of any disease on them. That's true now as well. Anyone of us could be infected without us knowing. So Sweden changed their strategy from preventing the spread, which was shown to be virtually impossible, to limiting it and reducing the harm it does to society. Basically, doing what's best long term. What they didn't know was that despite this being agreed upon before as a good idea between many states in case of an outbreak, not many would do the same and Sweden stood alone in this. This here is when other countries, both the media and public, started to criticize the country for how it handles things. But the answer to the question is that Sweden abandoned the idea of eliminating the spread quite early in favor of harm reduction, because the spread couldn't be contained. This is a decision I agree with.

Harm Reduction

But what did Sweden actually do in terms of harm reduction, considering all the dead?

Firstly I wan't to make one thing clear. Any action taken to either prevent or limit the spread of this has three goals in mind (my own list, not quoted from anywhere):

1. The hospitals' intensive care units must not be overloaded, as this will lead to people not getting treatment and death tolls will rise.
2. The Coronavirus must be kept away from the elderly and other high risk groups. They have prooven to be especially sensitive to this. If the virus starts spreading among elderly the number of dead starts rising fast and it also fills up the hospitals quickly (see 1).
3. The action taken should be a net positive for society. So while it may save lives due to the virus, it shouldn't cause more suffering or death due to other causes. And there are plenty of other causes, such as poverty, suicide, domestic violence, drug abuse and so on.

Please keep this in mind when discussing possible actions to take and the effects they may have.

I won't list all the things done here, things such as public transportation, pubs and restaurants, and job security (again, no expert. Just want to clarify a few things). I will just go into three things: curfews/stay at home-orders, schools, and masks. And I will say this here, I don't know that the best strategy is for every country, every region. These are just my thoughts on what has been done here.

Curfews, Lock-Downs, and Stay at Home-Orders

Sweden hasn't issued any curfews. And while there are some forms of stay at home-orders, like it's illegal to purposefully or out of extreme negligence spread this around, what Sweden has done is to give guidelines. And if the guidelines fail, set rules. And some such rules have been set. This is all simplified, of course. What many other countries did was to set rules first. This has also led many to criticize Sweden for it's lack of action, but I think it was the right move to make. Yes, there might be more early deaths, but it also might lower the risk and intensity of further outbreaks, reducing the overall dead in the end. And the thing is, it seems to have worked! The government trusted the general population to take personal responsibility in fighting the virus and population generally did that. No lock-downs necessary here so far.

As to the end result of this, we will just have to wait and see. What has happened recently however is that in many of the countries who took harsher actions, such as lock-downs, there has arisen a pressure from the puplic to open up again, despite all the experts virtually screaming no. And I agree with the experts here, in both cases. Sweden kept its communities fairly (but not totally) open to make it through this long term and the public pressure to open up here is actually very small. And if the other countries open up now they will most certainly face a second outbreak, which has already started to happen in places. Again, I'm not saying what's right or wrong for others. Heck, in some places the spread was so intense that curfews was pretty much necessary. What I'm saying is that I don't see this as valid criticism against Sweden.

Schools

That goes for schools as well. Early on in this we found out that children hardly ever get sick from this and do not spread it around at all as much. Yes, there are adults there as well, but mostly kids. This led the Swedish government to conclude that it was better to keep schools open (see goal 3 above), but students who feel any symtom of possible Covid-19 should stay at home. Because of this school attendance has been low, in my daughter's school attendance was roughly around half during spring, but kids still went to school. Did that increase the spread of the virus? Probably. Too much? It's hard to say, but I doubt it. Shutting down schools is a drastic measure I'd rather not take if i could avoid it. And secondary schools, collages, and universities started holding many more courses online, sometimes 100%, so that's good, but beside the point.

Masks

Another thing that has apparently shocked the population of the world is how few Sweden use masks in public. My wife has relatives in South Korea and they could hardly believe it when they saw footage of people in public without masks. They thought all swedes were crazy, so they made sure we got some good masks, which we gladly accepted and keep here in case they're needed. ”But aren't they needed now?!” I hear you shout through the screen, and my answer to that is in Sweden in general at the moment: no. There are a few things to consider here: what kind of mask it is and how to use it.

So what kind of masks are we talking about? Well, I would put them in two categories: filter and no filter. Filters come in many flavours and I'm really not qualified to tell you exactly what they do, but just know that they do different things under different circumstances for different amounts of time or wear. Some even help prevent diseases! The ones for viruses might keep the wearer from being infected if used correctly.

Masks without filters are usually only a piece cloth, most commonly a surgical mask (surgical masks have no filter!). They pretty much do nothing to keep the wearer from getting infected, but they do help keep others from infection since all they do is stopping the wearers virus filled saliva from flying around. That's all they do, which might help if used correctly.

So how do you use them correctly? There are many misconseptions as to the effectiveness of masks. I'm hoping to clear some of them up here. The reason Sweden doesn't recommend using them in public is to my knowledge twofold. The first reason is that they might give a false sense of security, which might lead people, infected and not, to walk around in public and take unnecessary risks. They have a mask so they should be safe, they feel (incorrectly). The second reason is user error. This lead the PHA to the conclusion that masks risk spreading the infection more than it contains it. How you use a mask correctly (not an expert! Double check this information if you want to use a mask!) is by putting it on, making sure it covers both mouth and nose, washing your hands, and then do not adjust the mask. If you adjust the mask you put your fingers on your face. Both fingers and face might be contaminated, putting both you and other at risk. If the mask has a filter you also need to make sure it seals to you face so air doesn't leak in from the sides. Some facial hair, like mine, can prevent a mask from sealing.

Personal Responsibility

What can we as individuals do about it, not just here en Sweden? What I've heard many times over is:

• Wash your hands thuroughly leaving and entering your home (everywhere, even thumbs, between fingers and under fingernails. There are guides online.).

• Stay at home if you have reason to think you might be infected.

• If in public, keep your distance from people.

• Don't leave your home if you don't need to (very much depending on where you live and other circumstances).
• Cough and sneeze in the crease of your elbow or in a napkin.

• Limit physical social interactions. Don't hang out with people you don't hang out with often.

• Don't visit your elderly relatives if you don't have to.

• If you are elderly, take extra precausions not to get infected (even if you don't care if you get it. You can still infect others).

• Don't travel unecissarily.
• Work from home if you can.
• Look up rules and guidelines in your country or area.

”But I have seen pictures of swedes out in public as if nothing's going on!” or something to that effect I've heard people say. And yeah, many of those photos are bad, I'm not going to deny that. Please keep in mind that they are examples of some of the worst behavior and that they probably occur in your country as well. Sweden has just been more popular to criticize in the media. Hence this article! But yes, plently of people in many countries have ignored the risks in society right now. In Sweden it's heppened in pubs and at graduation celebrations among others. In other countries sport games have been a big factor in the spread of the Coronavirus. It's because of examples like this that Sweden has issued some actual rules regarding this, not just guidelines. Many of those rules concern pubs and restaurants. And many venues, such as sport, music and amusement parks, have chosen to close down for a time. In these times when people have started to get tired of isolating themselves we must be extra vigilant of our own actions. This can easily lead to a second wave of the virus. ”Like the one going on in Sweden right now?” No! Because of this recent myth I am now going to explain a bit about testing.

Testing

Yes, testing. It's is a big part of combating the virus and it also comes in different flavours and like with filter masks I am not qualified to go over the different kinds of tests. Just know that not all tests are the same and I bet you can look up what actual experts have to say on it online.

Tracking down who's sick and who's not is one of the things you do as a first response when dangerous infectious diseases pop up. You quickly find who's sick and isolate them until they're healthy. We've got a pretty good grasp of it by know and it's one of the main reasons why different infuenza scares over time have turned out to be not that big (though some were bigger than you think. Look it up). It's not that they weren't that dangerous, it's that humanity is pretty good at dealing with them now. We couldn't deal with this one that way though.

But testing can still be a good thing to do sometimes, whether you want to see who sick right now, who has antibodies, or something else. When you test you can get what's called confirmed cases. This does not mean total cases, just the ones that are confirmed. That's one reason why some countries have had a high number of confirmed cases with a low number of deaths, like South Korea who from the start wanted to test as many people as possible. So when a country decides to increase testing, like Sweden recently did, you are going to see an increased number of confirmed cases. This does not mean things are getting worse, as the number of total cases might be the same as before.

I'll repeat: more tests leads to a higher number of confirmed cases, not a higher number of total cases. Confirmed cases or only the ones we know of. Most cases are probably not confirmed cases. To compare number of comfirmed cases between countries actually tells you very little of how those countries are doing. Here's another way of comparing.

Dead

There's a problem with comparing the number of dead of covid-19 between different countries though. Who do you count? People brought into hospitals with the virus who didn't make it, is that a good way? What it the patient died of something else and just happened to be infected? What about people who die outside of hospitals? The elderly are extra sensitive to this, so what about retirement homes? Turns out that not everyone uses the same methods. And some numbers are hard to trust, like the numbers from China, North Korea and Iran. Some countries are more inclusive in their counting, meaning the numbers can be extra high. Some are more exclusive, meaning the numbers can be extra low. Which way of counting is better? I don't know. The number of dead in Sweden due to covid-19 are extra high, and how the dead are counted is one of the reasons.

Valid Criticism

Okay, so I've been going over what can seem like how Sweden basically have done nothing wrong despite all the criticism, but that is definitely not my meaning. There have been mistakes. Communication between different bodies of government haven't always been the best, warning of not peing prepared enough for a pandemic before this weren't listened to, stock piles of medicine and other resources have been too low after years of making them smaller because of budget reasons, the general puplic haven't always taken the situation seriously, and then there's the other reason for the number of dead in Sweden. For years we've heard warnings from people who work in retirement homes or other parts of the elderly care that they were under staffed. Too few workers for too many patients, and never was it solved. With the workers being so few they couldn't stay at home, or were forced to work, if they felt a bit sick. And they often don't have time to take extra precautions between patients as well. If they don't work our elders get no care. If they do work our elders get infected. So that second goal from before about keeping the virus away from elderly and other high risk groups, that has failed. This is the other reason for the high number of dead in Sweden.

Take care everyone.

Listen to experts.

Take their advice to heart.

Stay safe.

On deportation of returning ISIL members

Svensk version kan hittas här: https://joakimhenberg.blogspot.com/2019/02/angaende-utvisande-av-atervandande-is.html

There’s been a lot of talk recently about deporting citizens who fought for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also called Daesh. Today one such discussion occurred at the place I work just as I was leaving, which left me thinking about it all the way home. So here’s what I think about it: it would be a bad idea for several reasons.

Firstly, revoking people’s citizenship and deporting them would be a racist policy. This might not be obvious at first glance. I mean, why should we have to take care of people, not even born here, doing horrible things? Do they even deserve citizenship? Why should that be our problem?

Those are legitimate concerns, but they are also a slippery slope which can lead you into a trap making your arguments racist. Wanting bad people to be punished is all well and good, but we need to be careful exactly how they are punished. Say some immigrant with citizenship commits some awful crimes: murder, rape, robbery and other horrible things. We don’t want him or her here, do we? Well, no. But say that person isn’t an immigrant. Take for example Breivik. Should the Norwegian government have deported him? To where?

And there you go. If the immigrant is deported then we have different laws based on country of origin, perhaps even ethnicity, no matter if you’re a citizen or not. All immigrants would then be second class citizens, which would be racist.

Secondly, deporting people is a bad punishment. But we want good folks here. People we can count on, who contribute to society. Those are the kinds of people we want as citizens, right?

It’s not wrong. But consider this: moving to another country is hard. You have to get a home and a new job quickly. Then you also have to learn the language as fast as possible, create an entirely new social network and deal with people who are suspicious of strangers. But is it worse than spending years in court and prison?

If you want your fellow citizens who support ISIL to be punished, great, but is forcing them to move really the punishment you had in mind? Wouldn’t it be better, more just even, to make them take responsibility for their actions before the law?

Thirdly, it would be poor foreign policy. Keeping good foreign relations is not a bad idea. It eases trade, lowers ethnic violence, secures peace, creates alliances, and probably a myriad of other nice reasons.

So what happens to those relations if we start sending war criminals and terrorists to other countries? Would you want more of those in your country? No? Well, other countries don’t want them either. Why should they accept the people we deport?

Hardly anyone likes ISIL, I don’t, and you likely don’t. But Swedish citizens returning after fighting for ISIL is a Swedish problem, so let Sweden deal with it. Make them face the law.