Work as a cure for mental illnesses? Opportunism and seeking ways in psychology and psychiatry in the first decades of state socialism in Hungary

ABSTRACT

In Hungary, until the end of the 1940s, there were two main established methods of occupying the mentally ill who were fit for work. From the end of the nineteenth century, a lesser number of patients underwent work therapy in mental asylums, whereas the others were treated with so-called family therapy (otherwise known as the heterofamilial system), exploiting the capacities of families in the countryside. As an important part of this, the mentally ill helped in housekeeping and agricultural work. However, following the political and ideological turn of 1948, the latter form of treatment became debated, and then it was gradually superseded. Parallel to this process, work therapy came to be the most popular type of treatment for mental illnesses, as work formed the basis of the ideology of the communist state, and thus, healing through work harmonized with the general tendencies of the era. This article examines texts related to work therapy published in neurological–psychiatric and psychological journals and monographs between 1954 and 1964. However, although work therapy appeared to be the “handmaiden of ideology,” and even though it was supposed to fulfil a particular role, in reality, the role and perception of work therapy were a lot more complicated.     

Psychological Well‐Being and Career Indecision in Emerging Adulthood: The Moderating Role of Hardiness

This study investigated the moderating role of hardiness in the relationship between psychological well‐being (PWB) and career indecision in 131 never‐employed Italian emerging adults. Cluster analytic methods produced high and low hardiness profiles. A structural equation modeling analysis underscored the importance of hardiness for moderating the negative association between PWB and career indecision. Specifically, findings revealed that being hardy is a crucial relevant personal resource in the presence of lower levels of PWB. The authors discuss the importance of analyzing simultaneously the role of PWB and hardiness in promoting engagement in the career decision‐making process and provide implications for setting up appropriate career counseling interventions with emerging adults. Suggestions for future research are presented, such as the use of longitudinal designs and qualitative methods.     

Job stress management protocol using a merge between cognitive-behavioral techniques and ergonomic tools

This paper presents a protocol for work distress assessment. Work distress is defined as a merge between nonergonomic related aspects, in tasks or environment, and adversely conditions perceived for a worker, in a certain work situation. This frame requires an approach that can treat individuals and organizational factors in the same way, at the same time. For this, we elaborate a psycho-ergonomics method, associating concepts and practices from cognitive-behavioral techniques and work ergonomic analysis, which we named CEWAT - Cognitive-Behavioral Work Analysis Technique. This paper presents CEWAT's foundations and structure, in steps. An application to a complex and dangerous system illustrates its benefits in the ergonomics action.     

W.E.B. Du Bois and Filipino/a American exposure programs to the Philippines: race class analysis in an epoch of ‘global apartheid’

The article highlights the ongoing relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois for the global analysis of race and class. Engaging scholarly debates that have ensued within the educational subfields of critical race theory (CRT) and (revolutionary) critical pedagogy, the article explores how a deeper engagement with Du Bois’s ideas contributes theoretically and methodologically to these two subfields. Of particular focus is Du Bois’s conceptualization of a ‘guiding hundredth,’ which he forwarded as a corrective to his ideas of a ‘talented tenth.’ The article also offers a case study analysis of the film Sounds of a New Hope, which documents a hip hop exposure program to the Philippines. The case study draws upon Du Bois’s ‘guiding hundredth’ for a twenty-first century context as a Filipino American cultural worker utilizes hip hop to articulate, analyze, and alter the lived experiences for Filipino/a Americans in a global diaspora.     

Parental altruism and nest leaving in Europe: evidence from a retrospective survey

We use retrospective life-history data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to assess parental altruism through the effect of parental resources and home characteristics on the age at which individuals now aged 50 or more left the nest in 13 countries. We show that the nest leaving age has declined from one cohort to the next and that the tendency has been of a relative decline in leaving one’s parents to start a family and an increase in leaving home to pursue higher education, even if the first pattern was still the most common for the baby-boomers. We test an altruistic model where constrained parents push the child out, where less constrained “proximity altruistic” parents can help the child by providing a home or even, for the richest “active altruists”, help the child leave the nest. Taking into account the endogenous child’s choices of education, we find that most parents helped by being proximity altruists, while some helped their children move out and that the quality of the home had an important influence on the nest leaving age.     

Attachment Styles,Loneliness, Quality,and Stability of Marital Relationships

Quality and stability of intimate relationships are determined by various factors. Associations between attachment styles, social and emotional loneliness, competence in being alone, and relationship qualities in couples have not yet been investigated. Sixty-three couples completed self-report measures of current relationship quality and duration, attachment style, and loneliness. Marital quality is predicted by means of experienced emotional loneliness, fearful attachment style, age, and participation in relationship counseling (R ² _corrected = .568). Length of relationship is predicted by age, experienced social loneliness, and competence in being alone (R ² _corrected = .648). Attachment styles, loneliness, age, competence in being alone, and participation in relationship counseling are all possible determinants of relationship qualities.     

The dynamics of homeownership among the 50+ in Europe

We use life history data covering households in 13 European countries to analyse residential moves past the age of 50. We observe four types of moves: renting to owning, owning to renting, trading up or trading down for homeowners. We find that in the younger group (aged 50–64), trading up and purchase decisions prevail; in the older group (65+), trading down and selling are more common. Overall, moves are rare, particularly in countries characterised by high transaction costs. Most moves are driven by changes in household composition (divorce, widowhood, nest leaving by children), but economic factors play a role: low-income households who are house-rich and cash-poor are more likely to sell their home late in life.     

Age,Health and Life Satisfaction Among Older Europeans

In this paper we investigate how age affects the self-reported level of life satisfaction among the elderly in Europe. By using a vignette approach, we find evidence that age influences life satisfaction through two counterbalancing channels. On the one hand, controlling for the effects of all other variables, the own perceived level of life satisfaction increases with age. On the other hand, given the same true level of life satisfaction, older respondents are more likely to rank themselves as “dissatisfied” with their life than younger individuals. Detrimental health conditions and physical limitations play a crucial role in explaining scale biases in the reporting style of older individuals.     

The Local and the National in Community Care: Exploring Policy and Politics in Finland and Britain

International literature on community care tends to focus on the national level of welfare institutions and policies. However, community care is largely a locally tailored service and this paper makes a case for local comparisons of community care policies. Using local case studies from Finland and Britain, the paper argues that focusing on the local level contributes to the comparative study of community care in two ways. First, local comparisons highlight the often distinctively local nature of community care policies and thereby add to our understanding of community care. Second, local comparisons extend existing cross‐country explanations of community care by showing that community care is largely shaped by local politics, together with indirect structuring by national contexts. As such, the local case studies highlight the importance of the relationship between policy and politics, which has often been neglected in comparative research.