Disabled yet intact: Guidelines for work with congenitally physically disabled youngsters and their parents

This paper presents the viewpoint that congenitally physically children, having never been nondisabled, may experience themselves disabled yet intact, with the disability an integral part of their identity. However, society, with its pervasively negative attitudes toward disability, perceives disabled people as incomplete, defective, and deviant. Hence, congenitally disabled children face the difficult dilemma of integrating these two divergent views of themselves. Parents and professionals are offered guidelines to facilitate the resolution of this dilemma; however, they must first carefully scrutinize their own attitudes toward disability so that these do not unwittingly impede the parenting and treatment processes.Harilyn Rousso is director, Disabilities Unlimited, Counseling and Consultative Services; consultant on women and disability, YWCA of N.Y.C.; chairperson, Association of Mental Health Practitioners with Disabilities.     

INTERVENTION STRATEGIES: PREDICTING FAMILY THERAPY OUTCOME*

A pre-defined list of family therapy intervention strategies was used to predict post-therapy perceived life happiness and marital happiness among husbands and wives. Clients presented with both child and marriage-focused problems. The data were analyzed separately for husbands and wives. In general, favorable outcome for husbands was associated with active restructuring operations on the part of the therapist. Prediction of outcome for wives was less clear. However, wives did appear to respond favorably to less active interventions such as actualizing transactional patterns and reframing.     

Psychophysical conditions and hormonal secretion in nurses on a rapidly rotating shift schedule and exposed to bright light during night work

The psychophysical conditions of 15 young female nurses, working in a rapidly-rotating shift system (2-2-2-2), modified according to some psychophysiological criteria, and exposed to short period (4 × 20 min) of bright light (2350 Lux) during their night duty, were studied in order to evaluate their adaptation to night work and to test a possible positive effect on it of bright light. Subjective evaluations of work load and psychophysical conditions, performance measures, hormonal excretion (cortisol, 6-sulphatoxymelatonin and catecholamines), oral temperature and activity-sleep logs were taken during the shiftwork cycle, comprising one morning, one afternoon and two consecutive nights under normal and bright light. The results showed that this rapidly-rotating shift system had little effect upon the normal circadian rhythms of the body. Moreover, the lengthening of the night shift to 10 h can be considered to be acceptable, provided that work load is reduced and there are sufficient rest pauses available. On the other hand, the reduction to 7 h of the length of the day shifts and delayed start of the morning shift to 07:00 h appeared to be convenient both in relation to the work load and sleep duration. Some positive effects of bright light upon psychophysical conditions and performance efficiency were noted, while hormonal excretion and body temperature did not show any effect of bright light; in particular, melatonin excretion was not suppressed appreciably by the bright light used.