Klein,Claymation, and Reparation

Armed with clay and a camera, Nathalie Djurberg propels the viewer into a visceral and primitive world of human destructiveness and desire. It's the Mother hones in on the effects of unchecked infantile probing, prodding, and invasion on the maternal body. Melanie Klein's ideas are germane in considering this work, in particular the idea of the depressive position struggle (in this case for both the viewer and the artist) around reparation for what is wrought by destructive impulses.     

The Emergency Dental Service at Southern Illinois University/Carbondale

Abstract

The Student Emergency Dental Service (SEDS), a program of Allied Health and Public Services, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), began treating patients in January 1978. The purpose of the program is twofold. The main emphasis of SEDS is to treat patients with dental-related disorders of an emergency nature. The other purpose of SEDS is to help raise the level of dental knowledge among the student population so as to prevent the emergency situations from occurring.

The Student Emergency Dental Service is essentially an “emergency only” service, even though prevention is highlighted. Such an emergency service cannot compete with a comprehensive service in terms of providing total patient dental care. Hence, the SEDS program has some innate limitations a comprehensive service does not. It must work from certain guidelines. It cannot treat everyone, and the mode of treatment must be altered to aid the emergency patient. This creates dilemmas that will be addressed in this paper. The organization, accomplishments, and advantages and disadvantages of the SEDS program at Southern Illinois University are also discussed.     

‘I am the face of success’: peer mentors in child welfare

Child welfare systems have struggled to create innovative, culturally sensitive programmes to address the multiple and pervasive barriers that exist in engaging child welfare parent clients in their service plans. Peer mentor programmes—those in which parents who have successfully navigated the child welfare system and reunified with their children, mentor parents newly entering the system—are designed to address some of these barriers, to improve reunification outcomes. Focus groups with parent clients (n = 25) and interviews with peer mentors (n = 6) were conducted to identify the characteristics of peer mentoring programmes that are critically helpful to parent clients, as well as the mechanisms that allow peer mentors to be effective in their work. The qualitative analysis uncovered three general themes to which both parents and peer mentors frequently referred in interviews—the value of shared experiences, communication and support. Additionally, the study found that peer mentorship has positive effects not only on parent clients but also on the mentors themselves. The inclusion of peer mentors in child welfare practice suggests an important paradigm shift within child welfare that could lead to culture change for the field.     

New Well-being Measures: Short Scales to Assess Flourishing and Positive and Negative Feelings

Measures of well-being were created to assess psychological flourishing and feelings—positive feelings, negative feelings, and the difference between the two. The scales were evaluated in a sample of 689 college students from six locations. The Flourishing Scale is a brief 8-item summary measure of the respondent’s self-perceived success in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose, and optimism. The scale provides a single psychological well-being score. The measure has good psychometric properties, and is strongly associated with other psychological well-being scales. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience produces a score for positive feelings (6 items), a score for negative feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create a balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative emotions. In particular, the scale assesses with a few items a broad range of negative and positive experiences and feelings, not just those of a certain type, and is based on the amount of time the feelings were experienced during the past 4 weeks. The scale converges well with measures of emotions and affective well-being.     

Social care and support for elderly men and women in an urban and a rural area of Nepal

This study has aimed to describe the care and support for urban and rural elderly people of Bhaktapur district, Nepal. Efforts were made to identify the feeling of some features of general well-beings associated to mental health, person responsible for care and support, capability to perform daily routine activities, sources of finance and ownership to the property. More than half of the respondents were found having single or multiple features of loneliness, anxiety, depression and insomnia. The rate of point prevalence loneliness was found higher in the above 80 years of age, urban respondents. Almost 9 in 10 respondents were capable themselves to dress, walk and maintain personal hygiene and majority of them were assisted by spouse, son/daughter-in-laws. Family support was common sources of income and ownership to the property was absolutely high.     

Paternal Hostility and Maternal Hostility in European American and African American Families

The authors examined the hypothesized influence of maternal and paternal hostility on youth delinquency over time. The investigation addressed significant gaps in earlier research on parental hostility, including the neglect of father effects, especially in African American families. Using prospective, longitudinal data from community samples of European American (n = 422) and African American (n = 272) 2‐parent families, the authors examined the independent effects of paternal and maternal hostility on youth delinquency. The results indicated that paternal hostility significantly predicted relative increases in youth delinquent behaviors above and beyond the effects of maternal hostility; conversely, maternal hostility did not predict youth delinquency after controlling for paternal hostility. Multiple‐group analyses yielded similar results for both ethnic groups and for boys and girls. These results underscore the importance of including both parents in research on diverse families. Neglecting fathers provides an incomplete account of parenting in relation to youth development.     

A ninth opinion

A mother relates five months of struggle to obtain a proper diagnostic study for her fifteen-year-old daughter's illness.     

Video lottery gambling: Effects on pathological gamblers seeking treatment in South Dakota

Fifty-eight pathological gamblers receiving treatment for addictive illness in two South Dakota hospitals were assessed for types of gambling and grouped into three categories; 15 video lottery only (VLO), 36 video lottery mixed (VLM), and 7 not video lottery (NVL). There were 51 male and 7 female respondents, with a mean age of 38.2. We hypothesized that video lottery would be the predominant type of gambling on several dimensions: level of recent activity, most money lost on one occasion, and number of DSM-IV criteria met. Of all gamblers, 87.9% had pathological involvement with video lottery. Video lottery gambling accounted for the highest level of recent activity. In the VLM group, video lottery gambling led to greater single-occasion monetary losses. In addition, significantly more DSM-IV criteria were met in the VLM group for video lottery gambling than for other forms of gambling these subjects had engaged in. Results indicate that video lottery gambling is the predominant type of gambling behavior engaged in by gamblers seeking treatment for addictive illness in South Dakota. We propose that these findings could be associated with the availability and stimulus differences between video lottery and other gambling types.The authors would like to thank Larry Atwood, Chemical Dependency Counselor at Keystone Treatment Center in Canton, S.D., for his assistance with data collection.     

The Problem-Oriented Method of Health Care Administration

Abstract

In 1968, Dr. Lawrence Weed^1,2 described the problem-oriented medical record as a basic tool in medical education. The authors attempted to adapt the “Weed System” for use in health care administration. The aims of the modification were to facilitate participative management in problem solving, and to formulate quality decisions by the consensus of an interdisciplinary group of managers.

Thirteen Department Heads were introduced to the Problem-Oriented System as described by Weed.^1,2 The Problem-Oriented Method of Health Care Administration (POM/HCA) was described by the Director as an extension of Weed's system.³

Weed's categories of Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP), were given for each problem presented at Department Heads' Meetings. The subjective information for the particular problem was derived from the felt or perceived needs, or the immediate pressures that so often arise in a multidisciplinary health care setting. Objective data came from identification and analysis of information about the problem. The assessment section was used by the Director to outline his thinking on the issue. The plan-for-decision section indicated the desired level of staff involvement in the decision-making process, by giving a numerical value to the area of freedom for the staff (adapted from Tannenbaum and Schmidt).⁴

Each Department Head was interviewed by the Management Consultant to find out how he or she experienced POM/HCA, their reactions to the numerical system for designating staff involvement in the decision-making process, and what he or she saw as the impact, advantages, and limitations of this method.

“Blood Doping:* An Update,” M.H. WILLIAMS. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature relating to the use of blood doping* in an attempt to improve the performance of an aerobic endurance athlete such as a five or ten km. runner or a marathoner. An earlier review of the literature by the author in 1975 concluded that there was not sufficient objective evidence to support the use of blood doping to increase endurance capacity. However, contemporary research demonstrates that when properly done, blood doping does significantly increase endurance performance in sports that are dependent on sustained, high levels of oxygen. The author also calls attention to the medical, legal, and ethical problems related to the practical application of blood doping. (The Physician and Sports Medicine 1981, July;9(7)59–64.)

* Blood doping is the process of removing blood from an athlete, usually an endurance-related sports participant, saving the blood and then about two weeks later, prior to competition, retransfusing into the system, to increase the oxygen capacity.

Contributed by John M. Miller, M.D.