Academic literature on the topic 'Weariness of life'

Summary: Objectives: Sri Lanka has a high suicide rate. The importance of suicidal ideations and their relationship to the common mental disorders (CMD) have not been adequately explored. This study examined whether patients harboring suicidal thoughts or life weariness would volunteer them. It also examined the relationship between life weariness, suicidal ideations, and the probability of underlying CMD. Method: A case control study was nested within a cross-sectional survey of attendees to the outpatients department in a general hospital. The index group consisted of patients presenting with multiple complaints and repeated visits, the control group was 100 patients randomly selected from a total of 5,767 between 16 and 65 years of age, not fulfilling criteria for the index group. Presence of underlying CMD was assessed by the General Health Questionnaire 30 (GHQ-30). The two groups were compared for symptoms volunteered, response to questions from GHQ-30 on suicidal ideations, and hopelessness. Results: Somatic symptoms were the most common in both groups. Eighty-one patients (81%) in the index group and 34 patients (34%) in the control group had probable CMD. No patient in either group volunteered suicidal ideation as a symptom. However, 59% of index patients and 26% of controls admitted life weariness, and 51/59 index patients and 15/26 controls who had life weariness also had underlying CMD as defined by GHQ scores. Conclusion: Patients who have suicidal thoughts do not volunteer them unless directly asked. There is a strong relationship between suicidal ideation and the probability of underlying CMD.

Augustine’s emphasis on groaning in Enarrationes in Psalmos reflects his eschatological frame for the earthly life. Augustine exhorts believers to cultivate a disposition of world-weariness appropriate to their status as pilgrims and exiles in this life, expressed by groans of suffering in earthly need and longing for heavenly fulfillment. This world-weary disposition has both an ethical and aesthetic character in that it con- tributes to the ordering of believers’ loves to a vision of heavenly beauty and enjoins an active response of solidarity with the suffering on earth.

Investigation was conducted under controlled conditions in the laboratory for plant production at the Faculty of Agriculture in Osijek. The cut roses used in the study were „Red Naomi“. Three different mediums of 300 ml volume were used in the study: ordinary tap water, Chrysal clear, Crystal soil gel. After symptoms of decay such as weariness of neck and yellowing and drying of petals were observed, each rose was taken out of medium and the volume of the residual liquid was measured. Leaves, neck and head of decayed roses were separately weighed, placed in paper bags and dried at 70 ºC for 24h and 48h respectfully. The smallest loss of medium volume (5.45 %) was recorded in cut roses that were stored in the Crystal soil gel, while the greatest loss of medium volume (47.71 %) was recorded in cut roses stored in Chrysal clear.

A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another thing might count as a good life, none of them can plausibly be identified with the good life, or the best life. Given the long history of that impasse, it seems futile to offer yet another candidate for the genus “good life” as if that candidate might be new, or philosophically defensible. And given the weariness, irony, and self-deprecation expected of a philosopher in such an impasse, it is difficult for any substantive proposal on this topic to avoid seeming pretentious.

Waiting is a common experience in medicalized gender transition. In this article, I address subjective experiences of medicalized gender transition through a temporal lens, focusing on personal narratives of wait lists, setbacks, and other delays experienced by trans patients. I consider administered waiting as a biopolitical practice of governance, one that has subjectifying and somatic effects on individuals and that speaks to the role of time in the administration of bodies, sex/gender, and biomedical citizenship. I ground my discussion in narratives created by trans people that chronicle their gender transitions; I analyze a set of gender transition vlogs appearing on YouTube, focusing on temporal aspects of medicalized transition and experiences of waiting. My discussion recognizes that the temporal modes of gender transition are multivalent, but these social media narratives also suggest being made to wait is an experience of power relations, one that is capable of producing submission, weariness, and precarity.

In the Despair episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene i.ix, the provocative material means for self-slaughter are emblematically doubled with the psychological inducements, particularly on the models of predecessor texts in Skelton’s Magnyfycence and the Cordela story in The Mirrour for Magistrates. The pairing of means and causes is part of a tradition. So also is the despair of a Christian believer over his own sinfulness, in the face of God’s law, as voiced by a conspiratorial evil conscience, leading to a sinful “unbelief and despair of God” (Luther) and likewise unbelief in salvation—and to an unconquerable self-accusation, which doubles the sinner with tormentors, or a diabolic Accuser, and tempts him or her to cut his/her losses, relieve his/her pain, sorrows, and world-weariness, and take his/her life. Other suicidal types in The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, who are not theologically confirmed in their wanhope or assisted by it to their end, such as Phedon or Malbecco, can nonetheless illuminate the projections, temptations, demons, and motions of the Christian despair-er, and his or her adversity, depression, distress, impatience, furor, world-weariness, melancholia, and driven-ness. The despair-er’s condition, as found in Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, can be further illustrated, diagnosed, and ministered to, by means of a variety of early modern and medieval moralizing and homiletic texts. And while the death of Shakespeare’s Cordelia by hanging conforms to Spenser’s account ( fq ii.x.32), her suicidal despair is only a slander bruited by the character Edmund. Rather, it is her would-be rescuer Lear who is the picture of misery and despair.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to examine the perspectives of both the spousal caregiver and care recipient on the caregiving experience in home-based palliative care.Methods: A qualitative research strategy involving home-based face-to-face interviews with older palliative care patients and their spousal caregivers was used to examine the caregiving experience.Results: Ten spousal caregivers and care recipient dyads participated in the study. Most informal caregivers viewed caregiving as an extension of the family relationship where caregiving responsibilities evolved over time. Spousal caregivers identified many negative reactions to caregiving, such as fatigue or weariness, depression, anger and sadness, financial stresses, and lack of time. Care recipients acknowledged the emotional and financial strain and expressed concern for their spouses. Both caregivers and care recipients were appreciative of home care services although they identified the need for additional services. They also identified difficulties in communication with formal providers and poor coordination of care among the various services. Both caregivers and care recipients disclosed some challenges with informal supports, but on the whole felt that their presence was positive. Additional positive aspects of caregiving reported by spouses included strengthened relationship with their spouse and discovering emotional strength and physical abilities in managing care.Significance of results: Health care and social service professionals need to recognize and understand both caregiver and care recipient perspectives if they are to successfully meet the needs of both members of the dyad.

Bakgrund: Det har visat sig att äldre, i västvärlden, utgör den grupp som begår flest självmord. Hög ålder medför nedsatt reservkapacitet och minskat motstånd mot yttre påfrestningar. Många äldre drabbas av depression, vilket är den vanligaste behandlingsbara riskfaktorn för livsleda och suicid. Samtidigt upplevs ofta ångest. Orsaker till livsleda kan vara en separation från en livspartner, genomgång av en dramatisk livsfas eller somatisk sjukdom. Självmordsbenägna patenter, som kan sägas vara i en existentiell kris, kräver särskild vård vid inläggning. Vårdpersonal har upplevt det viktigt att bemöta patienter med livsleda men inte alltid tyckt att de har möjlighet på grund av tidsbrist, stress och för lite kunskap. Syfte: Att beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenhet av att identifiera äldre patienter i psykiatrisk vård som känner livsleda och kanske inte längre vill leva och hur sjuksköterskor kan ha ett stödjande bemötande av dessa patienter och därmed främja deras psykiska hälsa. Metod: Fem semistrukturerade intervjuer gjordes med sjuksköterskor på en avdelning med inriktning att vårda äldre patienter med psykisk ohälsa. Resultat: Utifrån intervjuanalysen framkom två kategorier med vardera tre subkategorier. Kategorin Identifiering av patienter med livsleda hade subkategorierna Verbal - och icke verbal kommunikation, Åldrandets innebörd och Dödsönskan. Den andra kategorin, Stöd av patienter med livsleda hade subkategorier Acceptans, Bemötande och Vårdande miljö. Informanterna i studien uppfattade och bemötte patienternas livleda i sitt arbete och bemötte dem med psykiatrisk och somatisk vård. Genom stödsamtal, lyhördhet för de äldres behov och förutsättningar, uppmuntran till aktivering på de äldres villkor bemötte de på ett pedagogiskt vis de äldre patienterna i deras existentiella kris. Diskussion: Resultatet diskuterades i relation till resultat och litteratur. Det som framkommit i studien är att informanterna på valda avdelning på ett lyhört sätt adresserade de äldres problem och bemötte dem på ett pedagogiskt vis och med stor kunskap om de äldres problem och förutsättningar.
Background: It has been shown that elderly, in the western world, is the age group who commits the most suicides. An elderly person has a lower capacity and a lesser ability to come to terms with trying circumstances. The aging process influences psychological quickness, ability to adjust and sense of memory. Elderly are often subjected to depression, which is the most common treatable risk factor for weariness of life. Anguish is often experienced simultaneously. Reasons for weariness of life could be a separation from a partner or spouse, to go through a dramatic life phase or physical illness. Often an existential life crises is experienced and a feeling of standing on one’s own in life. Suicidal patients who experience a life crises demand special care when hospitalized. Nursing staff perceive it as important to treat patients who experience weariness of life but they do not always feel that they have the capacity to do so due to stress and lack of time and knowledge. Aim: To describe nurse ́s experiences of identifying and caring for elderly patients in psychiatric care who experience weariness of life and who might no longer want to live. Method: Five semi structured interviews were done with nurses on a ward specialized on psychiatric care of the elderly. Inductive content analysis has been used to analyze the interviews. Results: The analysis resulted in two categories: Identifying patients who experience weariness of life and Supporting patients who experience weariness of life. Three subcategories Verbal - and nonverbal communication, The signification of aging and Wishing to die are included in the category Identifying patients who experience weariness of life. Subcategories Acceptance, Caring and Environmental influence belong to the category Supporting patients who experience weariness of life. The informants in the study understood the elderly patient’s feeling of weariness of life and cared for them with psychiatric and somatic nursing. Through supporting conversation, a sensitive and empathic approach to the needs and conditions of the elderly, they encouraged them to become more active on their own terms. The informants treated the elderly with pedagogical sensitivity to support them in their existential crisis. Discussion: The results are discussed in relation to articles and literature and also in relation to the chosen theoretical basis of the study.

Emotional home demands, cognitive home demands, home pressure, development possibilities, autonomy, social support, nonwork–work interference, spouse–work interference, parent–work interference, religion/spiritual–work interference, domestic–work interference, health, exhaustion, cognitive weariness, life satisfaction, dual earner parents Dual earner parents have become the norm in today’s workplace (Weigel, Weigel, Berger, Cook, & Delcampo, 1995). Dual earner parents face many challenging roles that they have to try to balance; these include being a parent, spouse, employee, being involved in religious practices and juggling domestic responsibilities. According to Duxbury and Higgins (1991), it is very difficult for such parents to balance their various roles and multiple demands. All these challenging demands (home characteristics) can cause nonwork–interference which can, in turn, lead to well–being problems (Magnus & Viswesvaran, 2005). The general objective of this study is to investigate the home characteristics, nonwork–work interference and well–being of a sample of dual earner parents. A convenience sample of dual earner parents (N=207) was taken in the Vaal Triangle area in Gauteng. The following scales was used within this study: the Home Demands Scale (Peeters et al., 2005), Home Resources Scale (Demerouti et al., 2010); the Work–nonwork Interference Scale (Koekemoer, Mostert, & Rothmann, 2010); the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) (Goldberg, & Williams, 1988); and the OLBI (Oldenburg Burnout Inventory) Scale measuring exhaustion, Cognitive weariness (Van Horn et al., 2004); and life satisfaction (Diener et al., 1985). Descriptive statistics, Cronbach alpha coefficients, product moment correlations and multiple regression analyses were used to analyse the data. The results indicated that emotional home demands and lack of autonomy significantly predict physical ill health; emotional home demands and spouse–work interference significantly predict anxiety; and emotional home demands significantly predict depression. Gender, home pressure, developmental possibilities and parent–work interference were, in turn, significant predictors of exhaustion. Recommendations were made for future research and also, on a more practical level, for dual earner parents. One of the recommendations is that one needs to investigate the possible cross–over and spillover effects of work–nonwork interference between wives and husbands. Another is to investigate the positive side of work–nonwork interference.
Thesis (M.Com. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

This chapter focuses on Middlemarch and Betty Joseph and Paula Heimann that are concerned with how people fend off feelings of weariness in order to make the world, closest relationships, and long novels feel ardent, energized, and alive. It talks about aliveness by highlighting the shift in the novel from the ardor of a Saint Teresa to the weariness of her modern counterparts. The novel uses weariness, most strikingly embodied in the aging scholar Casaubon, to describe the exhausting task of understanding others as well as the difficulty of reading the novel itself. While “weary experience” threatens to suffuse the entire novel, from syntax to structure, ardor and a second affective term, aliveness, describe the feelings created by the paired activities of metaphor-making and idealization in the novel. The narrative voice highlights both the capacity of life to feel empty, dull, deadened, and meaningless and its own power to reanimate it.

This chapter focuses on the prevalent and complex disorder of fatigue as both a companion symptom to acute and chronic conditions and a persistent and debilitating disorder without a clear etiology. The fatigue experience is a persistent state of weariness— a multifactorial discord and imbalance that has roots in the physical, psychological, spiritual, energetic, and/or environmental dimensions of the patient’s life. Utilizing the integrative nursing principles, a whole-person approach to fatigue assessment and treatment is described. Emerging evidence for therapeutic modalities that are inclusive of movement therapies and restorative practice, meditation and relaxation, herbal treatment, and energy conservation management are explored.

Chapter 6 describes the desire for further change shown by the street-involved youth as they grew older and more mature. They were responding to recognition that their friendships need to change if their life is to change; boredom and wanting something more meaningful; unhappiness with their own drug use; weariness with being financially vulnerable; being frightened about the direction of their lives; a desire to be better than their parents; responsibilities to others, including a partner or a child; and utopian aspirations. The chapter also presents the experiences of some youth who had hopes but, at the time of the authors’ final meeting with them, were discouraged and had absorbed the street identity into their long-term idea about who they were.

Rachel Carson has become Saint Rachel, canonized time and again by the environmental movement. May 27, 2007, marked the 100th anniversary of her birth. In that year, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, Massachusetts, hosted a major Rachel Carson centennial exhibition. The show was a partnership project of the museum and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and it featured artifacts, writings, photographs, and artwork from Carson’s life and career. In 2012, the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring was commemorated by a Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens event and exhibit. From September 7 through October 23, the exhibit presented artwork, photos, and interpretive panels in the visitor center. Canonization, and the posthumous fame it bestows, comes at a price: the disappearance of the Rachel Carson whose work was driven by two forces. The first was the love of nature. A perceptive review of The Sea Around Us compares Carson with great science writers who share with her a love of nature: . . . It is not an accident of history that Gilbert White and Charles Darwin described flora and fauna with genius, nor that the great mariners and voyagers in distant lands can re-create their experiences as part of our own. They wrote as they saw and their honest, questing eye, their care for detail is raised to the power of art by a deep-felt love of nature, and respect for all things that live and move and have their being. . . . The second force was the love of a woman, Dorothy Freeman, a person who in Carson’s view made her later life endurable and her later work possible: . . . All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve—someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create, as well. . . .

We have witnessed a resurgence of mass demonstrations and other public forms of political protest in the Trump era, but are protests becoming less effective and delegitimated—counterproductive, even—precisely because of their frequency, as Richard Ford maintains in “Protest Fatigue”? Granted, more and more of us may be, in the immortal words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and, at marches against ever more virulent manifestations of sexism and racism, signs like “I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest This Shit” evince a certain weariness and frustration among the dissenting masses. But, in this chapter, I argue that more, not less, protesting—by more people, in more places, on more occasions—is what we need now, since it can have a galvanizing, reinvigorating effect and be no less legitimate than past protests such as demonstrations for women’s suffrage and the March on Washington. Especially in the digital age, mass protests, far from sapping our energy and yielding diminishing returns, have the potential to tap and replenish the ever-renewable resources of hope and solidarity.

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a controversial condition, conflicts about which have frequently burst out of the medical literature into the popular media. Whilst these controversies may initially seem to be of limited interest to those who do not routinely treat such patients, they also exemplify important current issues in medicine. These issues include the nature of symptom-defined illness; patient power versus medical authority; and the uncomfortable but important issues of psychological iatrogenesis. The subject is therefore of relevance to all doctors. Fatigue is a subjective feeling of weariness, lack of energy, and exhaustion. Approximately 20 per cent of the general population report significant and persistent fatigue, although relatively few of these people regard themselves as ill and only a small minority seek a medical opinion. Even so, fatigue is a common clinical presentation in primary care. When fatigue becomes chronic and associated with disability it is regarded as an illness. Such a syndrome has been recognized at least since the latter half of the last century. Whilst during the Victorian era patients who went to see doctors with this illness often received a diagnosis of neurasthenia, a condition ascribed to the effect of the stresses of modern life on the human nervous system the popularity of this diagnosis waned and by the mid-twentieth century it was rarely diagnosed (although the diagnosis subsequently became popular in the Far East—see Chapter 5.2.1). Although it is possible that the prevalence of chronic fatigue had waned in the population, it is more likely that patients who presented in this way were being given alternative diagnoses. These were mainly the new psychiatric syndromes of depression and anxiety, but also other labels indicating more direct physical explanations, such as chronic brucellosis, spontaneous hypoglycaemia, and latterly chronic Epstein–Barr virus infection. As well as these sporadic cases of fatiguing illness, epidemics of similar illnesses have been occasionally reported. One which occurred among staff at the Royal Free Hospital, London in 1955 gave rise to the term myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), although it should be emphasized that the nature and symptoms of that outbreak are dissimilar to the majority of those now presenting to general practitioners under the same label. A group of virologists and immunologists proposed the term chronic fatigue syndrome in the late 1980s. This new and aetiologically neutral term was chosen because it was increasingly recognized that many cases of fatigue were often not readily explained either by medical conditions such as Epstein–Barr virus infection or by obvious depression and anxiety disorders. Chronic fatigue syndrome has remained the most commonly used term by researchers. The issue of the name is still not completely resolved however: Neurasthenia remains in the ICD-10 psychiatric classification as a fatigue syndrome unexplained by depressive or anxiety disorder, whilst the equivalent in DSM-IV is undifferentiated somatoform disorder. Myalgic encephalomyelitis or (encephalopathy) is in the neurological section of ICD-10 and is used by some to imply that the illness is neurological as opposed to a psychiatric one. Unfortunately the case descriptions under these different labels make it clear that they all reflect similar symptomatic presentations, adding to confusion. Official UK documents have increasingly adopted the uneasy and probably ultimately unsatisfactory compromise term CFS/ME. In this chapter, we will use the simple term chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

Feelings of low mood are not trivial. In 2010 the National Center for Health Statistics of the Department of Health and Human Services asked a random sample of the U.S. population about their mood. In reply to Do you feel hopeless?, 6.8%, or 1 in 15, said yes. In reply to Do you feel worthless?, 5.3% said yes. In reply to Do you feel that “everything is an effort”?, a whopping 16%, or one in seven, said yes. Low feeling is very common. Yet it is not melancholia. Historically, plenty of people have suffered from low moods. Today, few of us can stay in our beds because we have to earn a living. Yet it was once common for middle-class women, in households that had servants, to take to their beds when feeling down. In 1917, London literary figure Virginia Woolf, age 36, noted in her diary for October 25: “Owing to the usual circumstances, I had to spend the day recumbent.” She meant that she was having her period, and always had to lie down. Still, menstruation was not the only reason she went recumbent. Late in 1918 she had a tooth out and spent two weeks in bed, “and being tired enough to get a headache—a long dreary affair, that receded and advanced much like a mist on a January day.” “Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature,” she recorded in July 1926. “Sank into a chair, could scarcely rise; everything insipid; tasteless, colourless. Enormous desire to rest.” In November 1931 she was assailed by “a perpetual headache,” and “so took a month lying down.” On October 5, 1932, she said, “I spent yesterday in bed; headache; infinite weariness up my back: clouds forming in my neck; half asleep.” So this is the kind of nervous behavior that was congruent with people of her social class at that place and time. But there are deeper, more alarming notes.