The Body Comes to Family Therapy: Utilising Research to Formulate Treatment Interventions with Somatising Children and their Families

Children and adolescents with functional somatic symptoms are challenging to understand and to treat. The challenges begin at the very outset of the intervention – with the neurological and psychiatric assessments. Patients presenting with functional somatic symptoms, as well as their families, frequently deny any emotional or family problem, and parents are often genuinely baffled as to why a child has suddenly become so ill and why no medical explanation is forthcoming. Families can be unwilling to engage in family assessment and therapy, and therapists may find that standard approaches to family therapy simply can end up alienating these families – the door to therapy is slammed shut. This article is the story of my struggle to understand somatising children and their families and to find a common language to enable us to co‐construct formulations, to agree to a treatment plan, and to work together towards a pathway to health. It is also about the role of research and how knowledge from different system levels – and most specifically about the body – may need to be integrated into the therapy to help bring about change.     

‘Got to gamble,but I’ve got no money.’ A qualitative analysis of gambling careers in South Italy

With its geographical differences, Italy provides an interesting case study for analysing the cultural and contextual origin of gambling-related problems. By investigating gambling careers, the study sought to scrutinize the interplay between the personal and environmental factors – including social and cultural aspects – that influence changes in gambling habits among gamblers in Naples (South Italy). The convenience sample consisted of 42 problem and recreational gamblers, male and female, aged between 23 and 71 years, with different employment status and educational level. Results clarify how Neapolitans’ gambling habits have moved towards individualization over time, how availability contributes to increasing gambling in various ways, and how employment status and concerns about money can increase the risk of gambling-related problems, thereby increasing socio-economic inequalities. Confirming previous studies, the study casts doubt on the idea that problem gambling is a chronic and progressive disease, and suggests that periods of excessive gambling can be followed by periods of regulated activity, even without turning to formal treatment. However, life events – either positive or negative – can hinder attempts to regulate gambling.     

Risk and protective factors in problem gambling: an examination of psychological resilience

Psychological resilience – successful adaptation when faced with adversity – is a product of the balance of risk and protective factors relevant to an outcome. This study examined if protective factors (perceived resilience; mindfulness; grit; self-efficacy) explained variance in problem gambling tendencies (assessed with the Problem Gambling Severity Index) beyond the HEXACO personality traits (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience) and risk factors for problem gambling (gender; age; socio-economic status; high frequency gambling behaviour; harsh unpredictable childhood environments; sensation-seeking; impulsivity; self-control; stress). This study used a crowdsourced community sample (n = 469) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Bivariate analyses showed that risk factors and some HEXACO traits (especially honesty-humility) were associated with problem gambling issues. Among protective factors, only trait mindfulness showed a bivariate association with problem gambling issues. Somewhat surprisingly, regression analyses revealed that protective factors did not explain variance in problem gambling beyond HEXACO traits and risk factors. However, in exploratory analyses, mindfulness and self-efficacy – both modifiable protective factors – moderated the relationship between high-frequency gambling (a key proximate antecedent of problem gambling) and problem gambling tendencies. These results suggest mindfulness and self-efficacy may serve as ‘buffers’ against the development of problem gambling issues and may be promising targets for clinical interventions.     

Between exclusion and colonisation: seeking a place for mad people’s knowledge in academia

The omnipresent psychiatric narrative of mental illness has always had its counter-narrative – the life stories of people labelled mad. The relationship between these two accounts has always been one of domination: mad voices have been – and continue to be – not heard, overwritten, silenced or even erased in the course of psychiatric treatment. As survivor researchers who have had these kinds of experiences, we wish to discuss parallels between this tradition and some contemporary academic efforts that claim to disrupt it.     

Was Cicourel’s critique in Methods and Measurement in Sociology too radical?

This article is a contribution to a mini symposium on the 50th anniversary of the publication of A V Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964). The central theme of the book is reviewed – the problem of the relationship between everyday language and cultural meanings, and the language of measurement in social research – and the lack of an adequate ontology of social actors is identified as being the cause of the problem. The solution offered by Alfred Schütz – that social scientific language should be derived from everyday language – is discussed and it is argued that this was probably too radical at the time the book was published, and is still generally neglected in the social sciences.     

Humanitarian response and stress in Kenya: gendered problems and their implications

ABSTRACT

Stress-related conditions such as burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder are a growing concern in the humanitarian sector. Aid workers themselves report not only that mental health problems are common, but that the support they receive from their employers is insufficient. Problematically, the experience of the international aid worker – particularly those who are white and from the global North – is often foregrounded in explaining what constitutes stress and related mental health problems. This indicates a wider problem of what is required of ‘the perfect humanitarian’ – a personality that is gendered and racialised – and how this influences the different experiences and treatment of national and international staff from aid agencies. This article explores the organisational culture and working conditions of humanitarian settings and their impact on the mental health and well-being of staff. It argues that there is a structural dimension to stress that is less to do with external security threats and more to do with the specific infrastructure, policies, and practices of humanitarian operations, with implications for aid workers which cut across dimensions of race, gender, and nationality.     

In the Spirit of Selden Bacon: The Sociology Of Drinking and Drug Problems

In 1943, the sociologist Selden Bacon proposed studying drinking behavior from a “sociologic” perspective. Since then, a problem-oriented approach – a sociology of problem drinking and problem drug use, not a sociology of drinking and drug use behavior – has dominated the literature on alcohol and other drugs. However, a review of the literature reveals a sociology of drinking and drug problems in the spirit of the research that Bacon proposed. This article suggests that the sociology of drinking and drug problems can be regarded as a multidisciplinary field of study and usefully divided among three primary perspectives: (1) a sociocultural perspective that considers social change, modern society, and cultural influence; (2) a socio-environmental perspective that explores social learning, social setting, and alienation; and (3) an ideological perspective that examines cultural, institutional, and professional ideologies. The sociology of drinking and drug problems exposes the considerable influence of “sociologic” factors on problem drinking and problem drug use across scientific disciplines and, in particular, that problem drinking and problem drug use, from a multidisciplinary standpoint, are not caused exclusively by biologic traits. However, the sociology of drinking and drug problems is limited by the problem-oriented approach. More research needs to analyze the normal use of alcohol and other drugs to better understand the connection between substance use and social life.     

FROM JUKE BOX BOYS TO BOBBY SOX BRIGADE

Through its analysis of the complex discursive struggle over Times Square's – and later America's – ‘bobby sox brigade’, this article reintroduces young women into historical and theoretical accounts of youth culture. In doing so it challenges subculture and moral panic theories for their over-emphasis on working-class masculinity and their inability to account for the complexity and localized specificity – both historical and geographic – that such case studies command. The bobby soxer and the conflicting debates she engendered must be understood as a product of wartime contingency and in relation to the contested discourses within and between different localized contexts and media forms; the bobby soxer was simultaneously positioned as the key problem of wartime and promise of the post-war prosperity ahead. This article ultimately proposes a theoretical framework focusing on localized and contested terrains of discourse, appropriate to (sub)cultural activity in times of war and other disruptions.     

Change we can believe in: Comparing longitudinal network models on consistency,interpretability and predictive power

While several models for analysing longitudinal network data have been proposed, their main differences, especially regarding the treatment of time, have not been discussed extensively in the literature. However, differences in treatment of time strongly impact the conclusions that can be drawn from data. In this article we compare auto-regressive network models using the example of TERGMs – a temporal extensions of ERGMs – and process-based models using SAOMs as an example. We conclude that the TERGM has, in contrast to the ERGM, no consistent interpretation on tie-level probabilities, as well as no consistent interpretation on processes of network change. Further, parameters in the TERGM are strongly dependent on the interval length between two time-points. Neither limitation is true for process-based network models such as the SAOM. Finally, both compared models perform poorly in out-of-sample prediction compared to trivial predictive models.     

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an ‘environment’ to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor ‘new materialism’ capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg’s theorization of the international as ‘the consequences of societal multiplicity’ provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, ‘societal multiplicity’ allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself.     

Disabled people as counterfeit citizens: the politics of resentment past and present

In this article I argue that disabled people in the United Kingdom have been tipped into an abyss of counterfeit citizenship. They have been smeared as ‘false mendicants’ – an old trick well documented in the historical archives of ableism. Neoliberalism has used this repertoire of invalidation – its noxious taint of cunning and fraud – as the ‘moral justification’ for welfare reform and for the pillory and notoriety into which the entire disabled community has been placed. Austerity – through the neoliberal politics of resentment – has made disabled people its scapegoat. I argue that a historical precedent for the contemporary demonisation of disabled people as counterfeit citizens can be found in the early modern period in the mythology of the ‘sturdy beggar’.     

Risk and protective factors for problem behaviors among youth in residential care

In accordance with problem behavior theory (PBT), the study examined the contribution of risk and protective factors among high-risk adolescents living in residential care settings (RCSs) to their delinquency, substance abuse, and risky sexual behavior, as well as the inter-correlations between these problem behaviors. The specific study variables were chosen to represent the personal and environmental factors operating on the adolescent. It was hypothesized that higher levels of problem behaviors would be associated with higher levels of sensation-seeking and deviant peer associations (risk factors), and lower levels of future orientation and parental support (protective factors).One hundred and forty seven adolescents (M = 16.03) from seven residential facilities for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems in Israel responded to structured self-report questionnaires.The powerful associations found between the abovementioned risk behaviors suggested a problem behavior syndrome among this group. The risk factors of sensation-seeking and deviant peer associations made the largest contribution to the prediction of problem behaviors beyond any background or protective factors examined. Of the protective factors, only future orientation was found to be significantly associated with problem behaviors: i.e., a more positive future orientation correlated with lower engagement in problem behaviors, an association that increased in strength with age.The apparent existence of a single behavioral syndrome among youth in RCSs and the central contribution to the syndrome of risk factors – in particular, deviant peer associations – points to the need for holistic group interventions addressing multiple risk factors.     

Visual Expressions of Corporate Superiority: A Review of Jacqueline Hassinck’s Photographic Art Project and Booklet ‘The Table of Power’

Arguing that institutional rationality constitutes a meta‐institution upon which the specific institutions of the capitalist social order depend, this paper explores the possibility that it might be interrogated through the imaginary worlds created by readers in their responses to literary fiction. It does so by constructing a fictive encounter between the response aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser and two novels by Ian McEwan, Saturday and Enduring love, both of which feature institutional rationality as a core element of the ‘reality’ from which they are constructed.

The conclusions are somewhat negative. The problems posed to McEwan’s personifications of institutional rationality, despite the author’s reputation for arbitrary and sometimes macabre plotlines, are nowhere such as to call into question their understandings of the events which befall them. Nor, reading the novels as explorations of that very one‐dimensionality, are readers likely to be induced into a questioning of their own understandings of the world. This is because the novels in question, like most modern literary fiction, have been produced within a tradition which reaches back to the romantic/humanist reaction to institutional rationality, and this makes it possible for readers to distance themselves from characters in which it is exemplified. Far from producing a critical Imaginary, readers who respond in this manner are likely to externalize any interrogations of institutional rationality suggested by its fictional recontextualization and produce, instead, one in which the superiority of their own understandings of the world is confirmed. Whilst this may be opposed to institutional rationality in the routinised sense of an antagonistic accommodation, nothing new is added by the reading of the novels.

Whilst some of the problem may lie in the characterization of the principle protagonists in the selected novels – which is both flat and static – it is suggested that there is also a problem with the initial expectation of a critical imaginary created by Iser’s theory. The fact is that its creation depends on an assumed response on the part of the reader that has no evidential basis. This empirical deficit cannot be made good either by Iser’s earlier construct of an ‘implied reader’, nor by his later posit of self‐aware role‐taking as a fundamental anthropological need. Whilst one cannot rule out the possibility that some readers might respond as Iser supposes – even to the novels discussed in this paper – there is no particular reason to rule it in either.     

Freedom or happiness? Agency and subjective well-being in the capability approach

Human agency is a pivotal part of freedom and happiness. This article outlines two aspects of agency – power and control and self-establishment of goals – and situates it in the capability approach and vis a vis SWB. One can view the CA as an integration of ‘agency’ and ‘outcome’ oriented approaches. When agency is possible, it has primacy. When not, it is valued achievements (among others SWB) that acquire importance. Therefore agency is key for understanding how SWB fits in the general policy framework as a valued outcome. Two important functions of SWB information in this respect are outlined: as a frame of problem and as a signalling device on the effectiveness of policy.     

Family Processes and Problem Behaviors in Middle‐Class African American Adolescents

This study examined the joint association between mothers’ and adolescents’ ratings of parental behavioral control and adolescents’ and observers’ ratings of mother – adolescent communication with adolescent problem behaviors in a sample of 86 middle‐class African American early adolescent boys and girls (age: M= 13.08 years, SD= 1.32) and their mothers. Consistent with hypotheses, greater adolescent‐rated parental behavioral control and better observer‐rated mother – adolescent communication were associated with lower levels of adolescent problem behavior, as examined using structural equation modeling. Furthermore, interrelationships between age and adolescent problem behavior were partially mediated by adolescents’ reports of parental behavioral control and observers’ ratings of positive mother – adolescent communication, which both decreased with adolescents’ age. Although the sample was primarily middle class, higher socioeconomic status was associated with more positive mother – adolescent communication, as rated by observers. Problem behavior was greater among boys than girls, but the hypothesized indirect effect of gender on problem behavior through associations with parenting was not observed. The findings demonstrate the utility of conceptually distinguishing between parenting and parent – adolescent relationships, and suggest that both have unique influences on middle‐class African American adolescents’ problem behavior.     

Young people,future hopes and concerns in Finland and the European Union: classed and gendered expectations in policy documents

In this article, I examine the ways in which governing bodies at the Finnish national and also European Union levels talk about young people and our shared future in Finland. I use their youth policy documents as material for critical discourse analysis. My argument is that, besides presenting visions of a desired future, these papers also produce and reproduce divisions between young people that reflect gender and class positions. Young people are divided into those who have potential, those who will take care of others’ needs, and those who are at risk of marginalisation. I also argue that the Nordic policy tendency to conceive of youth as a resource rather than as a problem is not consistent. Finnish youth policy has changed, firstly because of the changing economic environment – the politics of austerity – and secondly because of Europeanisation.     

A big hole with the wind blowing through it: Aboriginal women's experiences of trauma and problem gambling

Although studies have shown a link between social trauma and problem gambling (PG), there is little research involving Aboriginal women in this area, despite Aboriginal women being potentially at higher risk for both social trauma and problem gambling. This article describes the results of a qualitative phenomenology study asking seven Aboriginal women living in Western Canada to describe their experiences of social trauma and gambling problems. Results suggest four main themes, describing: (1) the Aboriginal women's experiences of social trauma (‘the three tigers’); (2) their use of gambling to cope with these experiences (‘a big hole with the wind blowing through it’); (3) their experience of problem gambling (‘I'm somebody today’); and (4) their process of healing from social trauma and gambling problems (‘a letter to John’). Participants described what they felt was a clear link between social trauma and problems with gambling, and how gambling helped to change their mood and block out the past. The results raise the possibility that Aboriginal women with gambling problems may need support to heal from social trauma – including racism and colonization – and that upstream initiatives to reduce the incidence of social traumas may be an important response to problem gambling among Aboriginal women.     

The feeling of the incommensurable: Lawrence Grossberg on affect and incommensurability

This essay analyzes Lawrence Grossberg's work on the concept of commensuration, and especially his suggestion that we face a generalized crisis in our mechanisms for commensurating values. In making explicit the ways in which Grossberg's reflections on commensuration connect with his recent assessment of the contemporary social landscape in the United States – particularly the affective landscape that he describes in his work on the election of Donald Trump – I suggest that Grossberg's approach is, in part, distinguished by its attentiveness to the affective dimensions of commensuration (and of incommensurability). It can thus be contrasted with many previous approaches to commensuration, which view it exclusively as a problem at the level of practical reason, focusing on how we adjudicate between different bearers of value and how we justify, or give reasons for, our choices among them. Although such questions are also present in Grossberg's work, I argue that his writings contain a subtle treatment of the moods, attitudes, and tacit dispositions that characterize what if feels like to live through significant breakdowns in established logics of measure and comparison. Following Grossberg, I claim that having an adequate account of this affective dimension is crucial if we are to construct political alternatives that can address the felt sense of crisis in American political life.     

In credit we trust: Building social capital by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh

In this paper we examine how a third-party – Grameen Bank in Bangladesh – created social capital that has been a boon to the explosive growth of Microfinance in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Using Putnam's definition, we show how Grameen Bank created social capital by forming horizontal and vertical networks, establishing new norms and fostering a new level of social trust to solve the collective action problems of poor people's access to capital. The fact that a Microfinance Institution (MFI) can create social capital has strong policy implications. Since social capital is a public good – non-excludable and non-rivalrous – the market will underprovide such good. This paper shows that Microfinance corrects another type of market failure—under provision of a public good, in addition to correcting the failure of the credit market. The social capital building aspects of an MFI need to be taken into account in the whole debate about the need for subsidy.     

Defining a threshold of harm from gambling for population health surveillance research

The measurement of harm in the context of non-problem gambling has received little attention from researchers in the field. Using the combined data from six provincial gambling surveys conducted in Canada between 2001 and 2005 (N = 12,285), we compared how different thresholds of defining gambling-related harm impacts prevalence, the relationship with indicators of gambling intensity and the characteristics of non-pathological gamblers who report experiencing below threshold symptoms of problem gambling. Survey items defining harm were drawn from the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) of the Canadian Problem Gambling Index. Three definitions of harm – reporting one or more problem gambling symptoms, reporting two or more problem gambling symptoms and having a PGSI score ≥ 3 – demonstrated a strong relationship with indicators of gambling intensity, and reliably differentiated low-threshold and zero symptom problem gamblers in terms of gambling characteristics and other risk factors.