Amy Winehouse: What her death should really mean to us?

Yesterday on July 23 Amy Winehouse died. If you haven’t heard this already you really must be living under a rock. ‘Could have seen it coming’ I hear you say, ‘She did it to herself’. And while I don’t dispute these comments, certainly not as a fan, I write in argument of what the death of Winehouse should be seen as. Rather than another predictable drug and alcohol-related death, whatever the cause of death was, it should serve as a warning to the rest of us.

Everyone only earlier this week was laughing at Winehouse’s appalling performance in Serbia. Looking back, the video suddenly becomes less amusing, and more of an ironic foreshadowing. It becomes a sad tribute to a troubled young woman.

Drug addiction is becoming all too commonly reported these days, even glamourised. Despite the condemning view that the media takes on drug-addled celebrities, that doesn’t hide the fact that young people see celebrities taking drugs, and will inevitably associate drugs with the ‘glitz and glamour of the rich and famous’. The media are naming Winehouse as the newest member to the ’27 club’: a list of musicians all of which who have died at the age of 27 due to drug and alcohol-related problems, such as Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

Amy Winehouse’s death should be a reminder that people die from drugs and alcohol, whatever your age, or bank balance. Without trying to sound like those videos you get shown in primary school, drugs aren’t glamorous. Alcohol certainly doesn’t make you into a better person. As students I’m sure we’ve all done things we aren’t proud of under the influence. Tragedies like this make us realise that we forget all too easily that these substances kill people.

Sickeningly a website was set up called ‘When will Amy Winehouse die?’ in a ‘humorous’ attempt to guess the death date of the singer, the winner ‘to guess Amy’s final breath and be crowned Mr. Or Mrs. Death…will be rewarded with an iPod touch.’ Even before yesterday this website would surely be considered vulgar and tasteless, let alone now. Unfortunately her death is likely to disappear into the media oblivion, and we will look back and remember her as a drug-addicted star who, like many before her, lost her life because of the effect they had on her.

Yes any of us could have predicted it happening. But regardless, the talent of one young woman is gone. A young life was lost yesterday. But most importantly, a young life was lost needlessly. None of us can say that this couldn’t have been prevented. Let’s not mutter ‘Could have seen it coming’, but consider how deaths such as hers can be prevented from happening in the future. Let’s hope that this can go some way towards promoting the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse, and serve as an example of how even the richest and most talented people can be destroyed by them.

Widening participation: Wrong and unethical?

On Thursday 14 July, a seminar is to be held by the Society for Research in Higher Education, posing the question: is widening participation wrong and unethical?

Until now widening participation was always considered a good thing, an aim even. Suddenly that is being retracted. Suddenly not all students should go on to higher education, regardless of their financial background?

Any student who has undergone A-Levels in the past few years will know the drill that schools force upon us: finish your AS Levels. Then write your personal statement. In schools up until now it was just assumed that if you wanted a career, you were going to apply to university. Anyone who wasn’t drafting their personal statements in Years 12 and 13 and looking at prospectuses was considered an anomaly, and forgotten in the rush to get us to decide what to do with the rest of our lives at 17 and apply for a relevant course to pursue that. Now the threat of £9,000 tuition fees hangs over anyone applying to university post-2012/13. Schools are realising that pushing every student possible into a degree is no longer an option, and alternative career routes, like apprenticeships, are now being more widely considered. Good. So they should be. It’s about time that routes other than degrees were more widely recognized. However, this should not be an assessment of whether students from lower-earning backgrounds should be encouraged to go to university, but a re-assessment of the encouragement that students are given.

Students have the right to go on to higher education, and should be made aware of this, and encouraged in their choice if they decide it is the path for them. Pushing students who lack the desire for further education into university, however, can only result destructively. But is it a greater evil to discourage students from applying to university because of their financial situation? An article in the Guardian described research from the University of Glasgow that claimed that students from lower socio-economic groups are more likely that their more advantaged peers to drop out because of debt…well, yes, of course they are. But does this mean that as a group they should not be as encouraged as other students from going on to further education?

This is a situation that could possibly lead to further widening between classes. A society where university is for only those who can afford it is not one we want to see. Universities bridge these gaps, generally providing a platform of opportunity for students regardless of background. Widening participation and encouraging those students that want to attend university and want to pursue careers that require a degree is not something that should be questioned. Education should be a right, not a privilege.

Hopefully this seminar will come to the conclusion that no, widening participation is not wrong or unethical. Pushing students into university with the belief that a degree is the only route to a career? Discouraging students from even applying to university because of their economic background? Now that is wrong and unethical.

Do we trust our doctors too much?

Do we trust our doctors too much? Have we stopped listening to our own bodies and instead listen to those who we perceive to be figures of authority and knowledge? A survey taken by The Sun recently revealed that 1 in 3 women have at some point in their lives taken anti-depressants. Does this mean that 1 in 3 women have suffered from depression? If this were true then our society would indeed be in a sorry state of affairs. Surely this figure demonstrates a readiness of our doctors to over-prescribe pills that do not actually go any way to solving problems, only pushing them to one side? Or it could display a worrying willingness of patients – especially females in this case – to accept and take what they’re told. Instead, shouldn’t we be exploring why someone is ill, mentally or physically, not throwing pills at them to make the symptoms go away, but finding the root cause?

I don’t claim to be a doctor, or have any clinical knowledge of depression or ‘happy pills’. Doctors (like journalists) do a job involving long, thankless hours, and come under a lot of unnecessary criticism. I’m not disregarding anti-depressants whatsoever. Some people do need them. My argument is that maybe we need to start listening to our own bodies more, what our body is telling us we need, rather than visiting the doctor for every single illness that ails us.

Two years ago I was in and out of the doctor’s office with a persistent cough that I couldn’t shift. It was keeping me awake at night, giving me breathing problems, and eventually making me ill every time I coughed. One night I couldn’t catch my breath whatsoever in between coughs, and I couldn’t breathe for about half a minute. It wasn’t much, but it’s a terrifying experience suddenly finding that you can’t breathe, for no matter how long. I went straight to A&E, where I was told that it was a ‘tickly cough,’ and to buy cough syrup and take pills to stop the gag reflex. I wanted to laugh.

Surprisingly the symptoms didn’t go away. I happened to have an appointment with my regular GP a few days later. I’d been bounced around from doctor to doctor, knowing that there was something seriously wrong with me, but nobody seemed to listen. He was a man that really listened to me, had been treating me since I was a child, and almost instantly diagnosed me with asthma and put me on one of the highest steroid inhalers, which, two years later, I am still on.

This article is not criticising doctors. It was a doctor that realised what was wrong with me in the first place. I have, to an extent, lost my faith in doctors. This is mainly due to being in and out of surgeries over the past few years and being made to feel like I was wasting their time or feeling belittled because I was back with ‘yet another “chest infection”. Doctors have to treat so many patients that may not be particularly ill, may have an illness that should just go away with time, or even patients that make up illnesses. They have to build up a resistance to caring too much.

This article is arguing that we need to start listening to our own bodies more. Not necessarily doctors less, but to ensure that our doctors really know how we’re feeling, and to not put all of our absolute trust in them and what is prescribed us, especially if we don’t always feel like we need it. At the end of the day, in most common scenarios, the person who most knows what their body should feel like and what their body needs is you. You’re the one living with that body. And you’re the one who should really be listening to it.