Care planning: a neoliberal three card trick

Introduction The three card game, sometimes called find the queen, is a classic confidence trick, typically taking place on an impromptu table top, set up on pavement or street corner. The tricksters usually operate in teams, pulling in punters and ‘losing’ games with their fellows to persuade prospective speculators the game is winnable. For our titular purposes the three card trick serves as a metaphor for broader deceits. We are concerned with how well-meaning mental health nurses can enter into a set of apparently rational practices, insisted upon by policy and protocol, seemingly motivated by ideals of care and protection from harm, yet functioning to destroy the very essence of what it might mean to be a caring, progressive practitioner by contributing to a mutuality of alienation that, at the relational level, is the opposite of what services intend to achieve. This may prove to be the case because an external confidence trickster (neoliberalism) is actually in charge, and the real function of the game serves other ends. The whole point of the game is that genuine players can never win, and for the trickster to triumph it is necessary that these punters are willing, gullible and in most circumstances accept losses without too much fuss. When the losers do not go quietly this is referred to in the argot of the con as ‘squawking’, and personnel are deployed on the periphery to ensure any squawk is minimised. Various strategies can be used to ‘cool out the mark’, and are analogous to the means by which people are assisted to adjust to life’s disappointments in other contexts, including encounters with priests or sundry psy-professionals (Goffman 1952; McKeown et al. 2013). This commentary paper seeks to provoke nursing out of its state of gullibility and self-deception even if this involves painful reflection on the losses inherent in our collective game of mental health care. If we are to defend the importance of mental health nursing we must think more critically about our complicity within oppressive systems of control and do something about it. There is a lengthy critical tradition to draw on. We urge mental health nurses to squawk, asserting a more recalcitrant and rebellious standpoint, preferably in alliance with service users, refusers and survivors. Acknowledging the constraints upon nursing’s agency, deficits of power, and structural disadvantage need not default to impotence and inaction: collective resistance is always possible, however difficult the circumstances

Inorganic carbon acquisition by chrysophytes

Twelve species, representing twelve families of the chrysophytes sensu lato, were tested for their ability to take up inorganic carbon. Using the pH-drift technique, CO2 compensation points generally varied between 1 and 20 µmol•L-1 with a mean concentration of 5 µmol•L-1. Neither pH nor alkalinity affected the CO2 compensation point. The concentration of oxygen had a relatively minor effect on CO2 uptake kinetics and the mean CO2 compensation point calculated from the kinetic curves was 3.6 µmol•L-1 at 10-15 kPa starting oxygen partial pressure and 3.8 µmol•L-1 at atmospheric starting oxygen partial pressure (21 kPa). Similarly, uptake kinetics were not affected by alkalinity, and hence concentration of bicarbonate. Membrane inlet mass spectrometry (MIMS) in the presence and absence of acetozolamide suggested that external carbonic anhydrase in Dinobryon sertularia and Synura petersenii was either very low, absent. Rates of net HCO3- uptake were very low (around 5% of oxygen evolution) using MIMS and decreased rather than increased with increasing HCO3- concentration suggesting that it was not a real uptake. The CO2 compensation points determined by MIMS for CO2 uptake and oxygen evolution were similar to those determined in pH-drift and were above 1 µmol•L-1. Overall, the results suggest that chrysophytes as a group lack a carbon concentrating mechanism, or an ability to make use of bicarbonate as an alternative source of inorganic carbon. The possible evolutionary and ecological consequences of this are discussed