Elizabeth Hughes, Dan Bressington, Kathryn Sharratt and Richard Gray
There is evidence that novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are commonly used by people with severe mental illness. The purpose of this paper is to undertake a scoping survey to…
Abstract
Purpose
There is evidence that novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are commonly used by people with severe mental illness. The purpose of this paper is to undertake a scoping survey to explore the inpatient mental health workers’ perceptions of NPS use by consumers.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional online survey of mental health professionals is used in the study. The participants were opportunistically recruited through social media and professional networks.
Findings
A total of 98 participants (of 175 who started the survey) were included in the analysis. All reported that some patients had used NPS prior to admission. Over 90 per cent of participants reported observing at least one adverse event relating to NPS use in the previous month. The majority of participants reported that patients had used NPS during their inpatient admission. Three quarters were not clear if their workplace had a policy about NPS. Most wanted access to specific NPS information and training. The participants reported that they lacked the necessary knowledge and skills to manage NPS use in the patients they worked with.
Research limitations/implications
Whilst the authors are cautious about the generalisability (due to methodological limitations), the findings provide useful insight into the perceptions of inpatient staff regarding the extent and impact of NPS use including concerns regarding the impact on mental and physical health, as well as ease of availability and a need for specific training and guidance.
Practical implications
Mental health professionals require access to reliable and up-to-date information on changing trends in substance use. Local policies need to include guidance on the safe clinical management of substance use and ensure that NPS information is included.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first survey of the perceptions of mental health staff working in inpatient mental health settings regarding NPS. The findings suggest that NPS is a common phenomenon in inpatient mental health settings, and there is a need for more research on the impact of NPS on people with mental health problems.
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Online environments have become a central part of our social, private, and economic life. The term for this is “digital existence,” characterized as a new epoch in mediated…
Abstract
Online environments have become a central part of our social, private, and economic life. The term for this is “digital existence,” characterized as a new epoch in mediated experience. Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in how online abuse impacts one's digital existence. Drawing on 15 interviews with women, this chapter demonstrates a type of labor—which I call “ontological labor”—that women exercise when processing their own experiences of online abuse, and when sharing their experiences with others. Ontological labor is the process of overcoming a denial of experience. In the case of online abuse, this denial stems partly from the treatment of online and offline life as separate and opposing. This division is known as digital dualism, which I argue is a discourse that denies women the space to have their experiences of online abuse recognized as such.
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Ian Davis and Mark Vicars
The purpose of this paper is to present two examples how stories and storying can be utilised to excavate forgotten points and junctures that result as fundamental episodes in the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present two examples how stories and storying can be utilised to excavate forgotten points and junctures that result as fundamental episodes in the forming of the subjective selves. Writing in-between masculinity and queerness both stories trace the experience of two boys through accounts of initiation and subjection.
Design/methodology/approach
Using autobiography as a method, in concert with Deleuzian-Guattarian notions of becoming and becoming other the paper explores how the discovery of subjective difference informs how the work of identity making and survival take place.
Findings
What is uncovered in the process of the paper is how we learn the disguises needed for survival through an early encounter away from the dominating and into the dominated. In this process of becoming other strategies are designed to disguise difference and avoid detection.
Social implications
The gaps and fissures that exist between intergenerational positions in conjunction with the straight/gay sexuality binary provide the environment within which the paper operates. Through personal biography the paper investigates how this structure informs the subjective positionality and the identity construction.
Originality/value
The openness of the writing found in both of these accounts, although clearly a narrative construction, are also akin to a stream of remembering or spontaneous prose writing. The accounts themselves are not heavily edited; they have not been figured and refigured to produce pleasing literary effects. Instead they remain raw utilising narrative tropes such as flash-back and dramaturgy simply as conduits to memory. The tropes that are employed could be read as defensive or distancing mechanism, a protection against the capacity of the unfolding lived experience to disturb and disrupt.
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In his apocalyptic book on the environment and public policy, Timothy C. Weiskel warned of the consequences of humanity's intrusion into the biological and geo‐chemical processes…
Abstract
In his apocalyptic book on the environment and public policy, Timothy C. Weiskel warned of the consequences of humanity's intrusion into the biological and geo‐chemical processes of the natural world. He said that our intrusions have been massive and thorough; that they now threaten to transform ecosystemic parameters; and that unless responsible public policy directs itself toward moderating our current destructive impact on the environment, we will face ecosystemic collapse and human catastrophe “on a vastly greater scale than has ever been recorded in human history.”
Timothy C. Weiskel and Richard A. Gray
To provide a brief illustration of how the circumstances of economic underdevelopment and ecological decline are reciprocally linked, we can begin by tracing the post‐World War II…
Abstract
To provide a brief illustration of how the circumstances of economic underdevelopment and ecological decline are reciprocally linked, we can begin by tracing the post‐World War II history of Africa. Political histories of the post‐war period abound for almost all parts of the continent, since it was during this era that many African colonies struggled for and won political independence. Detailed ecological histories of colonialism and the post‐colonial states, however, are just beginning to be researched and written. Nevertheless, several broad patterns and general trends of this history are now becoming apparent, and they can be set forth in rough narrative form even though detailed histories have yet to be compiled.
Timothy C. Weiskel and Richard A. Gray
The ecological decline of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and the violent and explosive characteristics of post‐Columbian colonial ecologies might well remain comfortably…
Abstract
The ecological decline of ancient Near Eastern civilizations and the violent and explosive characteristics of post‐Columbian colonial ecologies might well remain comfortably remote from us in our twentieth century world were it not for the disturbing parallels that such case histories seem to evoke as we consider our contemporary global circumstance. Just as in ancient times and in the age of colonial expansion, it is in the “remote environments,” usually quite distant from the centers of power, that the crucial indicators of environmental catastrophe first become apparent within the system as a whole. These regions are frequently characterized by weak economies and highly vulnerable ecosystems in our time, just as they were in the past. Accordingly, the environmental circumstances in these regions constitute for the modern world a kind of monitoring device that can provide early warnings of ecological instabilities in the global ecosystem.
It is eminently fitting that the Greeks who gave us their word for “speaking fair” should also have supplied us with the ultimate exemplification of its use. They were wont to…
Abstract
It is eminently fitting that the Greeks who gave us their word for “speaking fair” should also have supplied us with the ultimate exemplification of its use. They were wont to refer to the Furies, a group of avenging goddesses, as the Eumenides or “The Fair Ones.” Since the Furies were imagined as having a batlike shape which was adorned with a profusion of snakish hair, they were not fair at all, but rather terrifying, intimidating in the highest degree. To euphemize a phenomenon is to call it something other than what it most particularly is, anything at all provided the new designation is gentler, milder, less offensive, less threatening. It is even possible, as in the case of the Furies renamed Fair Ones, to effect a 180‐degree reversal of meaning.
How does one learn of atrocities that have been committed, and are being committed, in remote corners of our planet? The standard answer to this question would likely be, “Consult…
Abstract
How does one learn of atrocities that have been committed, and are being committed, in remote corners of our planet? The standard answer to this question would likely be, “Consult the indexes to the leading components of the American establishment press, such as, for instance, The New York Times Index.” But, by so doing, one would be deeply disappointed, as I was. If one wanted to learn the horrifying particulars of the genocide the government of Bangladesh has been waging for at least 20 years against the tribal peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, an exhaustive search of the American establishment press would yield, at best, only a most shadowy, tenuous, and distorted picture. One's only certainty would be that there has been unrest in the Hill Tracts and that a long‐suffering Bangladeshi government has had a trying time suppressing it. Indeed, one's dominant impression would likely be of a beleaguered government of a newly independent, “democratic” state struggling against its own unruly dissidents. The truth, of course, is quite other‐wise: The government of a dubiously democratic, newly independent state, in a relentless and openly avowed land‐grab, is waging genocidal warfare against the non‐Muslim tribal minorities who occupy lands along one of its borders with India. A Bangladeshi army commander operating in the Tracts once avowed the government's aim: “We Want the Soil but not the People of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.” A genocidal intention could not easily be more explicitly expressed.
Timothy C. Weiskel and Richard A. Gray
Current news on environmental problems frequently emphasizes the totally unprecedented nature of the ecological crises that beset us in this nation and the Western world as a…
Abstract
Current news on environmental problems frequently emphasizes the totally unprecedented nature of the ecological crises that beset us in this nation and the Western world as a whole. We are told, for example, that the summer of 1988 constituted “the hottest summer on record” in North America. Similarly we hear mat Boston Harbor has never in its history been so polluted, and in European waters seal populations died of an epidemic in 1988 on a scale never before witnessed by man. By stressing this “never before” aspect of events, it is sometimes argued mat the experience of the past is largely irrelevant for policy planners. Since our circumstances are new, so the argument runs, past experience leaves us with little or no instruction for the formulation of a practical public policy for the environment.
Caterina Pesci, Lorenzo Gelmini and Paola Vola
This paper draws on the thinking of the nineteenth-century Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and scholars who studied his thoughts on the relationship between nature…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper draws on the thinking of the nineteenth-century Italian philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and scholars who studied his thoughts on the relationship between nature and humans. Leopardi's philosophy of nature recognizes the alienness of nature in relation to humankind, thus challenging human governance of the planet. The poet’s thoughts align with the dilemma identified in the Anthropocene literature: who speaks for nature? This dilemma has accounting implications in terms of the frameworks and disclosures to be adopted. Therefore, Leopardi’s thoughts can become the basis for a more articulated and complex understanding of some key concepts and issues at the roots of SEA.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper utilizes content analysis to examine four essays by Giacomo Leopardi, which serve as the source of our data.
Findings
Leopardi recognizes the alienness of nature with respect to humanity and the voicelessness of nature as a generative of conflict. He also warned of the consequences of human governance that does not take nature’s needs into account. These findings open a discussion on the complex accounting implications of the distance between humanity and nature. They can inspire SEA scholars to change the status quo by developing new accounting frameworks from the perspective of nature and adopting forms of governance of nature that recognize the need to protect it as a voiceless stakeholder.
Originality/value
Through Leopardi’s humanistic and poetic philosophy, the perspective of nature can be infused into SEA studies, thereby promoting the need for a multidisciplinary and complex approach to the discipline.