The intersection of nonsuicidal self-injury and suicide-related behavior: Patterns of elevated risk and implications for college mental health

Objective: To analyze the overlap of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicide-related behaviors (SRB) among college students with regard to demographics, mental health, and coping styles. Participants: Respondents were 572 undergraduate students at a southwestern public university. Methods: Data were collected in 2015. Respondents completed a demographic survey and assessments of NSSI, SRB, internalizing symptoms (ie, anxiety, stress, and depression), aggression, and negative coping strategies. The survey was administered via a Web-based procedure. Results: Women reported more frequent cutting behaviors than men. Endorsement of NSSI was also associated with an increased likelihood of lifetime SRB. A subgroup of students endorsing both NSSI and SRB demonstrated poorer mental health, more negative coping, and self-reported female sex. Conclusions: College healthcare providers may benefit from competency-based training in techniques for the combination treatment of NSSI and SRB, as well as culturally based models of suicide.     

Foster Parents’ Nutritional Strategies and Children’s Well-Being

Among their many responsibilities, foster parents are tasked with providing healthy food and proper nutrition to children with a variety of physical, psychological, and emotional needs. Using the lens of symbolic interactionism, this exploratory mixed methods study examined how foster parents attend to the nutritional needs of abused and neglected children. Methods used included both quantitative surveys and qualitative follow-up interviews. Surveys were completed by 23 foster parents in a large, Midwest metropolitan area. Parents reported they provided their children balanced meals, although one-third of households reported instances of food insecurity. During qualitative interviews, foster parents (N = 9) described how children arrived at their home with a variety of unhealthy eating habits, some severe in nature. Parents discussed strategies used to modify and improve eating patterns, including offering healthy food choices, having children plan meals, and gathering as a family for daily dinners. In general, parents understood the link between unhealthy eating and past childhood trauma, but also reported being unprepared for more serious eating problems like hoarding. Findings indicate that foster parents need food assistance to increase food security as well as training in assessing and responding a variety of unhealthy child eating behaviors.     

A Systems Approach to Social Entrepreneurship

Currently, disabilities organizations are increasingly being challenged by the requirement for individualized service, expectations to show personal outcomes, and the need to base their services on evidence-based practices. Social entrepreneurship (SE) is being put forward as an innovative approach for dealing with these challenges. This article presents a systems approach to SE based on a program logic model. This model identifies the input factors (a strong social vision, exploiting opportunities, maximizing resources), throughput strategies (entrepreneurial orientation, critical thinking skills, networking, capacity building), and outcome components (improving people’s lives, community-building, improving society) of SE at the micro, meso, and macro level. Also, the importance of planning for contextual changes as a social entrepreneur is discussed. The article concludes with presenting three inspiring practices regarding SE in the field of disabilities organizations.     

NGO Strategies in an Authoritarian Context,and Their Implications for Citizenship: The Case of the People’s Republic of China

This study argues that different cities in China have different resource environments available for NGOs. Organizations react to these resource environments by constructing appropriate resource strategies, which in turn shape the characteristics and structures of the NGOs of that city. It further examines how these characteristics and structures influence the construction and performance of citizenship in an authoritarian environment. Specifically, some types of NGOs encourage Chinese citizens to be passive, while others offer a model for people to actively engage with social issues. This is aptly demonstrated in an analysis of NGOs operating across four cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming, and Nanjing—which reveals three different types of resource environments and behavioral models for NGOs. We subsequently discuss the implications of each model for citizen engagement.     

Disability,personalisation and community arts: exploring the spatial dynamics of children with disabilities participating in inclusive music classes*

This paper uses personalisation and the capabilities approach to explore inclusive music classes for children with disabilities in Scotland. It provides a unique insight into the impact of participation through the voices of the disabled young musicians, their parents and tutors. The study highlights the power of inclusive spaces to transform lives, to build confidence and contest disabled identities. It engages in the spatial dynamic of opening up inclusive spaces, as well as exposing emerging tensions in the liminal space that is created through movement between safe and supported spaces and the antithesis, spaces that disempower and marginalise. The findings suggest good practice around personalisation, when conceived of from a social justice perspective, as a template for working with other marginalised groups and in other professional settings.     

Rethinking the Individualized Education Plan process: voices from the other side of the table

Parent involvement in the process of creating an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is authorized under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal law in the United States that ensures children with disabilities have the opportunity to receive a free appropriate public education alongside their peers without disabilities in the least restrictive environment. Yet much research has shown that parents often feel like outsiders during the process. To understand parent perspectives about how educators might help make the IEP process more collaborative and inclusive, this study collected qualitative data from 35 parents of students with disabilities who have worked to develop an IEP with a school team. Our findings provide insight into parent experiences and evidence that parents have many suggestions for how educators can improve the IEP process. In our discussion section, we provide educators with strategies to address parent suggestions.     

Care in a Time of Austerity: the Electronic Monitoring of Homecare Workers’ Time

Austerity places intense pressures on labour costs in paid care. In the UK, electronic monitoring technology has been introduced to record (and materially reduce) the working time and wages of homecare workers. Based on empirical findings, we show that, in a ‘time of austerity’, care is reductively constructed as a consumption of time. Service users are constructed as needy, greedy, time‐consumers and homecare workers as resource‐wasting time‐takers. We point to austerity as a temporal ideology aimed at persuading populations that individual deprivation in the present moment, self‐sacrifice and the suppression of personal need in the here and now is a necessary requirement to underpin a more secure national future. Accordingly, women in low‐waged care work are required to eschew a rights‐bearing, present‐tense identity and are assumed willing to suppress their entitlements to lawful wages as a sacrifice to the future. By transforming our understandings of ‘care’ into those of ‘time consumption’, and by emphasizing the virtue of present‐tense deprivation, a politics of austerity appears to justify time‐monitoring in care provision and the rationing of homecare workers’ pay.     

Subtyping Non-treatment-seeking Problem Gamblers Using the Pathways Model

This study examined whether distinct subgroups could be identified among a sample of non-treatment-seeking problem and pathological/disordered gamblers (PG) using Blaszczynski and Nower’s (Addiction 97:487–499, 2002) pathways model (N = 150, 50% female). We examined coping motives for gambling, childhood trauma, boredom proneness, risk-taking, impulsivity, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and antisocial personality disorder as defining variables in a hierarchical cluster analysis to identify subgroups. Subgroup differences in gambling, psychiatric, and demographic variables were also assessed to establish concurrent validity. Consistent with the pathways model, our analyses identified three gambling subgroups: (1) behaviorally conditioned (BC), (2) emotionally vulnerable (EV), and (3) antisocial-impulsivist (AI) gamblers. BC gamblers (n = 47) reported the lowest levels of lifetime depression, anxiety, gambling severity, and interest in problem gambling treatment. EV gamblers (n = 53) reported the highest levels of childhood trauma, motivation to gamble to cope with negative emotions, gambling-related suicidal ideation, and family history of gambling problems. AI gamblers (n = 50) reported the highest levels of antisocial personality disorder and ADHD symptoms, as well as higher rates of impulsivity and risk-taking than EV gamblers. The findings provide evidence for the validity of the pathways model as a framework for conceptualizing PG subtypes in a non-treatment-seeking sample, and underscore the importance of tailoring treatment approaches to meet the respective clinical needs of these subtypes.     

Using an Acculturation‐Stress‐Resilience Framework to Explore Latent Profiles of Latina/o Language Brokers

With survey data from 243 Latina/o early adolescent language brokers, latent profile analyses were conducted to identify different types (i.e., profiles) of brokers. Profiles were based on how often Latina/o early adolescents brokered for family members, as well as their levels of family‐based acculturation stress, negative brokering beliefs, parentification, and positive brokering beliefs. Three brokering profiles emerged: (1) infrequent‐ambivalents, (2) occasional‐moderates, and (3) parentified‐endorsers. Profile membership was significantly predicted by ethnic identification and brokering in a medical context. Respect, brokering at school, and brokering at home did not significantly predict profile membership. In addition, parentified‐endorsers had more frequent perceived ethnic/racial discrimination and depressive symptoms than other profiles. In contrast, infrequent‐ambivalents engaged in risky behaviors less frequently than other profiles.