you know christmas is coming when the piano playing kids in your neighbourhood pound out carols on their instrument with the ssame zest as they do their bach and mozart.

it's amazing how a person's family background can affect a person. psychomed has shown me just that. met a patient yesterday who related how his parents pressured him as a child to perform well in school, and who, if he didn't, was caned for every mistake he made. this happened when he was in primary school, and when he was in secondary school, he felt he was unable to cope with the workload and so attempted suicide. now he's in a tertiary institution and the people around him, including the lecturers, are full of contempt for him because of what happened. it hurts him, and he feels that his condition is being trivialised. he's struggling to keep his dignity amidst the hostility he is getting and this is making him very depressed. granted, this is only his side of his story, but he can't be making up very much of it.

my heart went out to him, because i am, after all, a product of this ruthless rat race called the singapore education system, and in many ways i wished i never had to go through it. sure it gave me a strong foundation is maths and science, but i've got a niggling feeling that i should have learnt more and developed a more healthy interest in things like literature and history. i look at my younger cousins now coping with the numerous and massive changes in the system, and hear stories about how parents are forcing their primary school kids to find a niche for themselves in order to secure a place under the direct school admissions and i can think of only one word - scary.

spent a couple of days at the institute of mental health last week. it wasn't scary or terrifying or anything like that, but i would say that a bit of me was shaken to see the patients. see, patients admitted to imh have more severe conditions than those in the psychiatry wards in the peripheral hospitals, and their symptoms are correspondingly more dramatic and obvious. one banged the table and screamed loudly for his father and God midway through our interview, while another shared with us his worry that a certain member of parliament was being cursed by people on the streets. this was very real to him, and it disturbed him so much that he swallowed half a bottle of clopramazine so that he could stop hearing the voices.

i salute the people who work there, because it ain't easy.