jdilla.xyz

The mental health of Georgia Farmers

2023-11-07

The Georgia Rural Health Innovation Center at Mercer University School of Medicine did an online statewide survey between January and April 2022 . The survey drew 1,651 people in the agriculture industry. It looked at their mental health and well-being. Here’s what the survey found:

29% of farmers said they thought of dying by suicide at least once a month.

42% of farmers have had suicidal thoughts at least once in the last year.

47% said they experienced loneliness at least once a month.

49% reported being sad or depressed at least once a month.

39% said they felt hopeless at least once a month.

Truly shocking numbers.

Recap Roswell covered in Appen Media

2023-11-01

My side project, Recap Roswell was covered in Appen Media, our local news outlet this week:

“I feel like Roswell, Georgia, the United States would be healthier if we have more of those institutions, or micro institutions, where people are connecting and going through the process of deciding what they think they should do together and then, trying to make that happen in the real world,” Dillard said.

In May, Dillard built Recap Roswell from scratch using ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by the nonprofit organization OpenAI.

For each post, he creates a transcript from the video recording of the latest council meeting. Then, he runs the transcript through the OpenAI API, based on a chain of different requests which synthesizes it down to a quick summary.

“You now are taking hundreds of hours of time and condensing it to something that someone, like yourself, can get through in 15 or 20 minutes,” Dillard said.

I appreciate them taking the time to discuss the project with me!

The rate of reports to child protective services

2023-10-25

I found these to be astoundingly high, so much so that I am wondering if there is an error in the data. From the National Library of Medicine:

37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years. Consistent with previous literature, we found a higher rate for African American children (53.0%) and the lowest rate for Asians/Pacific Islanders (10.2%).

I have no expertise in this area, but the point of the paper is trying to differentiate between first time investigations and follow up investigations, since presumably children that are investigated once are more likely to be investigated again.

In 2014, 4.57% of all US children had a maltreatment investigation... Of these, about half (2.39%) had no previous investigation in the 2003–2014 database. After adjusting for database-first-time investigation rates as described in the preceding section, we estimate that 2.09% had a true first-time investigation.

It occurs to me that even though I'm a parent, I'm not sure what exactly would cause a CPS investigation and what wouldn't.

If this data is correct, I'm torn between being sad for a whole lot of families and wondering if we're over investigating.

Opioid crisis fact of the day

2023-10-25

The opioid overdose crisis has been ongoing for over two decades in Canada and the U.S. The current mortality rate is greater than the worst years of the HIV/AIDs epidemic in these countries.

From The Conversation

The US Armed Forces as a family business

2023-10-18

Moreover, in some ways the military has become a “family business” with over half of enlistees having a close family member with military service.

From The draft ended fifty years ago. Can the all-volunteer force survive another fifty?.

One of my less conventional beliefs is that the draft, while annoying for individual people, would be good for the United States because it ensures that the population is more broadly represented in the military.

Ironically, since the draft was ended, the military is the one US institution to see public trust in it increase.