Long‐term use of methylphenidate continues to confer benefits

Patients continue to receive benefits from treatment for attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with methylphenidate after long‐term use, researchers have found. Some patients may be withdrawn from the medication, however. Therefore, all patients should be assessed periodically to determine whether they continue to need the medication. The study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, was conducted because, while long‐term use of methylphenidate for children with ADHD is frequent clinical practice, its benefits are unclear. They looked at whether the medication remains beneficial after 2 years. Methylphenidate, a stimulant, has been controversial in some quarters because it is a controlled substance, However, the first‐line treatment for ADHD is psychostimulant medication, such as methylphenidate. How long children should take is is a question, but 60% of children receive stimulant treatment for ADHD for more than 2 years, and this is increasingly common, extending even into adolescence and adulthood. This is partly due to the awareness that ADHD is not a pediatric‐only condition. The study, “Continued benefits of methylphenidate in ADHD after 2 years in clinical practice: A randomized placebo‐controlled discontinuation study,” was published online May 21 by the American Journal of Psychiatry.     

Briefly Noted

The biennial International Drug Policy Reform Conference, sponsored by the Drug Policy Alliance and held Nov. 7–9 in St. Louis, Missouri, was full of varying sessions on harm reduction and reform — 45 of them in all. An article by Filter editor Will Godfrey summed up his perspective — he was the only print reporter so far to have covered the entire conference. We asked him what his feeling was about the prospects for treatment and harm reduction working together, as they have in the past. “There's plenty of friction, but there can and should be rapprochement between the harm‐reduction and traditional treatment communities,” he told ADAW. “Many people in the harm‐reduction movement pursue traditional recovery, and there are treatment folks who support harm reduction. All should be trying to save lives and empower people. Harm reductionists' legitimate concerns about mainstream treatment include its coercive or controlling deployment, its frequent eschewal of evidence‐based practices and its promotion of abstinence at the expense of stigmatizing people who use drugs. Treatment advocates often overlook that most people who use drugs are fine. And in any case, everyone must be free to choose their own path.” But the fact that two approaches — one more radical than the other — coexist still is bound to make some treatment providers uncomfortable. After all, some of the speakers said that even supervised consumption sites are unfair to drug users, who have no need to be “supervised,” and instead should be free to use drugs. All viewpoints were there. “There's constant debate in the harm‐reduction movement about working to change systems that inflict harm from the inside, versus calling for radical reforms from the outside,” said Godfrey. “I think both approaches are simultaneously necessary.” Not everyone saw the conflict. “I have to say that I didn't see an anti‐public health movement there at all,” Maia Szalavitz, who is writing a history of harm reduction and is respected in both harm reduction and some, at least, treatment camps, told ADAW. “There has always, of course, been tension between activists and researchers and between people who want to fight within the system and those who want to tear it all down.” For the Filter article, go to https://filtermag.org/drug‐policy‐reform‐movement/ .     

Collaborative Music‐Making with Digital Audio Workstations: The “nth Member” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding the Role of Technologies in Audio Composition

This article examines amateur music‐making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music‐making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi‐modal activity through a heuristic device: the “nth member.” Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilizing conversation analytic techniques—“turn‐taking” and “next‐selection”—to capture two key interactional moments.     

Recording and Interpreting Work‐Related Daydreams: Effects on Vocational Self‐Concept Crystallization

This mixed‐methods study examined the effects of recording and interpreting work‐related daydreams on vocational self‐concept crystallization and attitudes toward daydreams. Fifty‐one college students were assigned to 1 of 2 experimental groups—daydream journal group (n = 15) and daydream interpretation group (n = 18)—and a control group (n = 18). Data were analyzed using analyses of covariance. At posttest, both experimental groups showed higher levels of vocational self‐concept crystallization than the control group, and the daydream interpretation group perceived their daydreams as more relevant than the control group. Qualitative data were collected via written postintervention surveys and embedded as a supplement to the quantitative design. The qualitative data support the findings that participants in the experimental groups gained a greater awareness and clarity regarding their vocational self‐concepts and a greater belief in the relevancy of work‐related daydreams.     

Memento Mori: The Book as a Cut

Despite Testo Junkie’s overt criticisms of psychoanalysis, this essay attempts to read the formal aspect of the work—as a process of mourning, a body-essay, an experimental protocol of intoxication—through the lens of the everyday practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Looking at the way soma erupts in the consulting room, the conundrums of agency and identity, Preciado’s (2013) work on the biopolitics of the psychopharamacopornographic era is shown to be critical to any unraveling of a symptom. On a more personal scale, Preciado’s own stated intention that the writing of the book should function as a cut, as a Memento Mori, is read in this essay as a depiction of the extreme limits one must traverse to locate an experience of desire, beneath or beyond the apparatuses of the state—something that Preciado shows as penetrating further into our lives and bodies than many of us are prepared to acknowledge.     

Infants Experience Perceptual Narrowing for Nonprimate Faces

Perceptual narrowing—a phenomenon in which perception is broad from birth, but narrows as a function of experience—has previously been tested with primate faces. In the first 6 months of life, infants can discriminate among individual human and monkey faces. Though the ability to discriminate monkey faces is lost after about 9 months, infants retain human face discrimination, presumably because of their experience with human faces. The current study demonstrates that 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants are able to discriminate nonprimate faces as well. In a visual paired comparison test, 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants (n = 26) looked significantly longer at novel sheep (Ovis aries) faces, compared to a familiar sheep face (p = .017), while 9‐ to 11‐month‐olds (n = 26) showed no visual preference, and adults (n = 27) had a familiarity preference (p < .001). Infants’ face recognition systems are broadly tuned at birth—not just for primate faces, but for nonprimate faces as well—allowing infants to become specialists in recognizing the types of faces encountered in their first year of life.     

Fight Club,or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary” aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service‐oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter‐myth” capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post‐industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo‐Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender‐focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value‐rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience‐based counter‐Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late‐capitalist situation.     

Multi‐type maltreatment and the long‐term adjustment of adults

Multi‐type maltreatment refers to the experience of more than one form of child maltreatment (sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological maltreatment, neglect and witnessing family violence). Researchers have largely ignored the presence of other types of child abuse and neglect when examining the adjustment problems associated with a particular form of maltreatment. The association between ‘multi‐type maltreatment’ and adjustment was explored in the current study. Retrospective data were obtained on (a) the degree to which maltreatment types co‐occurred, (b) childhood family characteristics and (c) adjustment problems in adulthood in an Australian self‐selected community sample (N=175). As hypothesized, a large degree of overlap was reported in the experience of the five types of maltreatment. Family characteristics—particularly family cohesion and adaptability—discriminated between respondents reporting single‐type and multi‐type maltreatment. Greater adjustment problems were associated with reports of a larger number of different maltreatment types. Multi‐type maltreatment should be recognized as a crucial aspect of the nature and impact of child maltreatment and considered in the development of programmes for the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Note passing as gendered practices of public ambiguity in a hyper‐masculine organization

This article explores a surprising and seemingly mundane organizational practice: passing notes during professional meetings. Based on 34 in‐depth interviews with women in a hyper‐masculine organization — the Israeli military — this study focuses on what I term gendered practices of public ambiguity. It demonstrates how these practices shed light on three interrelated paths to power at work: (i) practices of public intimacy between men; (ii) practices of women's degradation by men; and (iii) practices of recognition claims by women. The tension between the publicity inherent in the routine passing of notes and the ambiguity of their contents calls for a more nuanced theorization of gendered power practices, which transcends the accepted dichotomy of doing and undoing gender, reproducing or challenging the symbolic gender order. The findings show that gendered micro‐practices can become polysemic symbolic spaces in which women redirect the flow of power, if only temporarily and locally, and turn it into a multidirectional and multi‐agentic resource. The conceptual contribution of these findings is discussed in terms of the positioning of women in hyper‐masculine environments as pragmatic subjects who (re‐)construct mechanisms of power out of the restricted repertoire available to them.     

NASADAD requests $250 million for Phase 4 stimulus

If there will be a Phase 4, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D‐California) has promised, of stimulus money to help America cope with the fallout from COVID‐19, the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment field hopes to get some of it this time. Publicly funded SUD treatment and prevention got nothing — nothing — from the $2 trillion CARES Act passed at the end of March (see “In case you haven't heard,” ADAW, April 3, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.32684 ).     

COVID‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices

‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?’ This invitation — sent by one of the authors to the others — led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID‐19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together‐with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID‐19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.     

WHEN IS TRADE PROTECTION GOOD FOR GROWTH?

The empirical relationship between trade protection and economic growth is surprisingly fragile, as shown in a number of other papers. We address one possible explanation for these findings: that the relationship is contingent on the pattern of comparative advantage, following the endogenous growth literature. Our findings suggest that such contingencies do in fact exist—in particular, the correlation between tariffs and growth is strong and positive for skill‐abundant countries—and are robust to the choice of control variables. (JEL F13, F43, O19, O24)     

AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF THE PERSISTENCE OF GENDER‐BASED STEREOTYPES

This paper experimentally investigates the role of gender‐based stereotypes in the forecasting of risk attitudes. Subjects predict the gamble choice of target subjects in one of three treatments: (1) Visual—the predictor can only observe the target; (2) Information—the predictor has individuating information about the targets' response to two statements from a risk‐preference survey; and (3) Combined—the predictor both observes the targets and has the targets' two responses to the risk‐preference survey. Our results suggest that stereotypes play a considerable role in forming predictions about others' risk attitudes and that these stereotypes persist even when individuating information is available. (JEL C91, D8, J16)     

Methadone and buprenorphine in prison: Success in RI

The omnipresence of substance use disorder in prisons and jails cries out for treatment — and so do the inmates — but until recently, it has been scarce. Leading the way is the small state of Rhode Island, where Cranston‐based CODAC, an opioid treatment program (OTP), is providing methadone inside the state's jail/prison facility, with staff working alongside corrections (see ADAW, May 7, 2018).     

Self‐Destructive Symptomatic Frames in Clinical Adolescents: Is the Same Different?

This study examines individual and family predictors of different self‐destructive patterns—only suicidal ideation, only nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI), or suicide attempts (that may also include both suicide ideation (SI) and NSSI)—in a sample of outpatient adolescents (N = 42; 86% females) with mean age of 16 years (SD = 1.86). Results indicated that there are differences in youngsters with self‐destructive behaviors in their perception of paternal rejection and maternal control, when compared with youngsters reporting only SI. Adolescents from the groups with self‐destructive behaviors differ only in age. Together, these data highlight the relevance of adopting an ecosystemic perspective, which includes both the patients and their families, regarding treatment and prevention of self‐destructive symptomatic frames.     

Employment and the Risk of Domestic Abuse Among Low‐Income Women

This paper uses data from 2 randomized evaluations of welfare‐to‐work programs—the Minnesota Family Investment Program and the National Evaluation of Welfare‐to‐Work Strategies—to estimate the effect of employment on domestic abuse among low‐income single mothers. Unique to our analysis is the application of a 2‐stage least squares method, in which random assignment enables us to control for omitted characteristics that might otherwise confound the association between employment and domestic abuse. We find that increased maternal employment decreases subsequent reports of domestic abuse in both studies. In the Minnesota Family Investment Program—a program with an enhanced income disregard that allowed welfare mothers to keep a portion of their welfare income as earnings rose—an increase in household incomes appears to have contributed to reductions in reports of domestic abuse.     

Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential1

The notion of linguistic stance as a non‐grammaticalized form of evidentiality is here explored through an investigation of reported speech in English interaction. Reported speech is found to be one of a variety of resources with which speakers lay claim to epistemic priority vis‐à‐vis recipients. Such resources are not identifiable as stance markers independently of the sequential contexts in which they appear; sequential position is shown to be central in providing at once a constraint on what can be said and a resource to exploit in saying it. Resources dependent on sequential position to index stance are deemed to be interactional evidentials to distinguish them from the well‐documented stand‐alone evidentials. Interactional and stand‐alone evidentials, as forms of deixis, are directed to the orientations of epistemic authority and accountability respectively; their distinct means of marking evidentiality are grounded in the motivation to be explicit with regard to accountability and inexplicit with regard to authority.     

The Rape Joke as Ur-Joke

In this paper I argue that the rape joke is the joke par excellence. The ur-joke. Jokes speak the truth like dreams and symptoms and errors. The rape joke does not simply speak a truth—the truth about rape, or rapists—its truth is oddly the truth of joking itself and the tragicomedic vicissitudes of human sexuality. This is one way to understand the importance of Vanessa Place’s work and its ethical stakes.     

Prescreening,In‐Depth Exploration,and Choice: From Decision Theory to Career Counseling Practice

The authors present a 3‐stage model—Prescreening, In‐depth exploration, and Choice (PIC)—aimed at increasing the quality of the career decision‐making process and its outcome. PIC provides a framework for a dynamic and interactive process that emphasizes the role of career counselors as decision counselors, whose aim is to facilitate an active decision‐making process. The proposed model offers the advantages of systematic, analytical processing, while remaining compatible with individuals' natural way of thinking. The authors outline the implementation of PIC, discuss the role of intuition in decision making, and compare the PIC with the person‐environment fit approach.