A closer look at private lives 2: addressing the mental health and wellbeing of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Australians

Based on a national survey of almost 4000 people, the report reveals strong links between psychological distress and drug use among LGBT Australians. Executive Summary A Closer Look at Private Lives 2 is a companion to the second Private Lives report released in 2012. The research and writing of both reports were funded by beyondblue and the Movember Foundation. The project was jointly managed by GLHV and ARCSHS, La Trobe University. Background The first Private Lives was released in 2006 and at the time was one of the largest reports on LGBT health and wellbeing anywhere in the world. Both the first and second reports provided a snapshot of LGBT Australian’s everyday lives. They included demographic data on diversity within LGBT communities and data on LGBT Australian’s physical and mental health, health service use, relationships, experiences of discrimination and community connections. This companion report, in contrast, focuses on the mental health and wellbeing of LGBT Australians. It relies on the mental health data from Private Lives 2 and looks, in detail, at variations in psychological distress and resilience between LGBT and mainstream communities and variations within LGBT communities according to gender identity, sexual identity, age and socio-economic status. It also looks at the relationships between LGBT Australians mental wellbeing and their experiences of heterosexist discrimination, drug use, LGBT and mainstream community engagement, and health service use. The report concludes with an evidence-based LGBT mental health policy and program framework to guide the development of policies, programs and services aimed at promoting LGBT Australians’ positive mental health and their access to quality care. Methodology Private Lives 2 reported on the findings of a national, online survey of the lives of 3,835 LGBT Australians. Respondents came from all states and territories and from rural, regional and remote areas. The companion report used two of the validated scales from Private Lives 2 as measures of mental health outcomes: the K10 Psychological Distress Scale; and the Brief Resilience Scale. The development of the LGBT mental health policy and program framework involved a review of recent Australian population and health promotion strategies and a separate review of the research and grey literature on LGBT-inclusive service provision in Australia and overseas. Related identifer: ISBN 978192191569

Consistency in statistical moments as a test for bubble cloud clustering

Frequency dependent measurements of attenuation and/or sound speed through clouds of gas bubbles in liquids are often inverted to find the bubble size distribution and the void fraction of gas. The inversions are often done using an effective medium theory as a forward model under the assumption that the bubble positions are Poisson distributed (i.e., statistically independent). Under circumstances in which single scattering does not adequately describe the pressure field, the assumption of independence in position can yield large errors when clustering is present, leading to errors in the inverted bubble size distribution. It is difficult, however, to determine the existence of clustering in bubble clouds without the use of specialized acoustic or optical imaging equipment. A method is described here in which the existence of bubble clustering can be identified by examining the consistency between the first two statistical moments of multiple frequency acoustic measurements

An Estimate of the Gas Transfer Rate from Oceanic Bubbles Derived from Multibeam Sonar Observations of a Ship Wake

Measurements of gas transfer rates from bubbles have been made in the laboratory, but these are difficult to extrapolate to oceanic bubbles where populations of surfactants and particulate matter that inhibit gas transfer are different. Measurements at sea are complicated by unknown bubble creation rates that make it difficult to uniquely identify and observe the evolution of individual bubble clouds. One method that eliminates these difficulties is to measure bubbles in a ship wake where bubble creation at any given location is confined to the duration of the passing ship. This method assumes that the mechanisms slowing the gas dissolution of naturally created bubbles act in a similar manner to slow the dissolution of bubbles in a ship wake. A measurement of the gas transfer rate for oceanic bubbles using this method is reported here. A high-frequency upward-looking multibeam echosounder was used to measure the spatial distribution of bubbles in the wake of a twin screw 61-m research vessel. Hydrodynamic forcing functions are extracted from the multibeam data and used in a bubble cloud evolution model in which the gas transfer rate is treated as a free parameter. The output of model runs corresponding to different gas transfer rates is compared to the time-dependent wake depth observed in the data. Results indicating agreement between the model and the data show that the gas transfer rate must be approximately 15 times less then it would be for surfactant-free bubbles in order to explain the bubble persistence in the wake

Improving e-therapy for mood disorders among lesbians and gay men

Introduction This toolkit provides the first comprehensive set of guidelines for tailoring mood-disorder e-therapies to the needs of same-sex attracted people. It gives developers of e-therapies a set of practical recommendations for adjusting e-therapies to more effectively accommodate lesbians and gay men. These recommendations are supported by in-depth research that was designed specifically to inform this toolkit. Summaries of this research are provided in the toolkit and detailed findings are available in published research articles. This toolkit also provides information on the mental health-related challenges that are often faced by same-sex attracted people and links readers to key resources and organisations for further information. Checklists and other tools are included as aids for developers to assess the inclusiveness and relevance of e-therapies to lesbians and gay men. In short, this toolkit contains an extensive set of tools and explains why and how they could be implemented

Health information systems: international lessons

At present Ireland lacks really effective and usable health information systems. The priorities listed in the draft ‘Information for Action’ report cannot be realised within the constraints of the existing systems. Our health information systems are not people centred; they do not facilitate assessment of quality; they make measurement of equity very hard; they do not support an adequate level of democratic or political accountability. The current systems lack credibility with health service staff, at least partly because they seldom see any results from them. There is no adequate system for analysis of and reporting on most of the current Irish health information systems. Despite these problems, components of our systems work well, and produce data of high quality. The Irish Cancer registry provides accurate, timely reports on cancer incidence in Ireland. The National Disease surveillance Centre does excellent work on the collection analysis and dissemination of infectious disease data. The quality of the data collected in the HIPE system by ESRI, and in the Vital Statistics system by the CSO are good. The national disability register works well. It is imperative that the existing systems are not broken in the attempt to bring in new systems. There are many different models in Europe and elsewhere of working health information systems. We would particularly suggest that elements of the systems used in New Zealand, Finland, Scotland and Canada could provide models for further development in Ireland. Specifically, New Zealand has a working model of an e-health Internet; Finland has a good model of a registry based system; Canada has a working model of systems using and analysing health data. Scotland has a very interesting system, with very close integration with primary care. This is a weakness of the Canadian, and especially the Finnish systems. Devising a system based on the best elements of these systems would produce a very powerful tool indeed. It is also worth noting that such a system might lead to substantial opportunities for Irish IT companies here and abroad

Resolution dependence of rough surface scattering using a power law roughness spectrum

Contemporary high-resolution sonar systems use broadband pulses and long arrays to achieve high resolution. It is important to understand effects that high-resolution sonar systems might have on quantitative measures of the scattered field due to the seafloor. A quantity called the broadband scattering cross section is defined, appropriate for high-resolution measurements. The dependence of the broadband scattering cross section, $\sigma_{bb}$ and the scintillation index, $SI$ on resolution was investigated for one-dimensional rough surfaces with power-law spectra and backscattering geometries. Using integral equations and Fourier synthesis, no resolution dependence of $\sigma_{bb}$ was found. The incoherently-averaged frequency-domain scattering cross section has negligible bandwidth dependence. $SI$ increases as resolution increases, grazing angle decreases, and spectral strength increases. This trend is confirmed for center frequencies of 100 kHz and 10 kHz, as well as for power-law spectral exponents of 1.5, 2, and 2.5. The hypothesis that local tilting at the scale of the acoustic resolution is responsible for intensity fluctuations was examined using a representative model for the effect of slopes (inspired by the composite roughness approximation). It was found that slopes are responsible in part for the fluctuations, but other effects, such as multiple scattering and shadowing may also play a role.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, preprint version of paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, at \url{https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0002974

A plastic-damage constitutive model for the finite element analysis of fibre reinforced concrete

A unique constitutive model for fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) is presented, which combines a number of mechanics-based sub models for the simulation of directional cracking, rough crack contact and the crack-bridging action of fibres. The model also contains a plasticity component to simulate compressive behaviour. The plasticity component employs a frictional hardening/softening function which considers the variation of compressive strength and strain at peak stress with fibre content. Numerical results from a range of single-point and finite element simulations of experimental tests show that the model captures the characteristic behaviour of conventional fibre reinforced concrete with good accuracy