Injecting risk behaviours, self-reported mental health and crime

This paper explores differences between two types of illicit drug users (heroin users and non-heroin users) in relation to injecting risk behaviours, self-reported mental health, driving and crime.Key findingsParticipants were divided into two groups based on recent heroin use: heroin versus non-heroin.Both groups were aged around 40yrs, mainly male, single and unemployed. Recent ice/crystal was significantly higher in the heroin group. While recent speed and base use was significantly higher in the non-heroin group. One-fifth of the heroin group and one-tenth of the non-heroin group reported the recent use of cocaine. Cannabis use was common among both groups on a near-daily basis. The heroin group reported a significantly higher use of benzodiazepines, methadone, buprenorphine, buprenorphine-naloxone and oxycodone in the last six months. The non-heroin group reported a significantly higher recent use of morphine. The heroin group were significantly more likely to report borrowing and lending a needle and reusing their own needle in the last month.Around two-thirds of both groups had experienced an injection-related health problem in the month preceding interview. Nearly half of both groups self-reported a mental health problem in the last six months, mainly depression and anxiety. Of those who reported recently driving, one-fifth in both groups drove while under the influence of alcohol. While nearly all reported driving while under the influence of an illicit drug, mainly cannabis.The heroin group were significantly more likely to report a criminal activity in the last month, mainly drug dealing and property crime. Over one-third of both groups had been arrested in the last 12 months, mainly for property crime and use/possession of drugs

Mapping transnational subjecthood : space, affects and relationality in recent transnational Italian fictions

This article addresses the construction of transnational subjects in contemporary literary narratives, focusing on two recent novels in Italian by Gabriella Kuruvilla and by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel. Exploring the construction and the experience of the individual subject as spatial, relational, embodied, and linguistic practice in everyday life, the analysis draws upon theory in human and social geography, as well as in literary and cultural studies, to uncover the complexity of the human subject in mobility

Developing a Sustainable Group Tobacco Control Program in a Community Mental Health Clinic

While substantial practical, empirical, and theoretical contributions have been made toward the implementation of healthcare innovations, significantly less attention has been directed towards the sustainability of these interventions. For this reason, many healthcare innovations become unsustainable over time—yielding few long-term improvements, causing stakeholder disenchantment, and wasting valuable resources. The use of tobacco products is a leading cause of preventable death and disease in the United States that is disproportionately prevalent among individuals with severe mental illness, making the development and sustainment of evidencebased tobacco control programs imperative to alleviating this public health burden. As a final project in Grand Valley’s Doctor of Nursing Practice program, a tobacco control program was implemented at a local community mental health organization with limited funding, utilizing the EPIS framework to promote the long-term sustainability of these clinics. Furthermore, while this programming is projected to become a sustainable healthcare innovation within the designated community mental health organization, low attendance, high drop out and attrition, and the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited this project’s finding

Facts, fictions, fakes: Italian literature in the 1970s

In her article, Jennifer Burns examines the apparent ‘silence’ of the literary scene in Italy in the 1970s, a period which is remembered in Italian social and cultural history for the various protest movements, acts of political violence, and the inability of ‘professional’ politicians to understand the new developments within society. The article explores the literary activity of some Italian writers at the ‘centre’ of the literary scene, such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Leonardo Sciascia, and analyses the reasons why such ‘committed’ authors abandoned fiction to engage in journalism. Burns’ thesis is that the tension found in Italian society marginalised traditional literary forms, such as the novel, since the writer, in order to be read, needed to be ‘rapid, precise, shocking’. Increasingly the newspapers and literary magazines gave more space to lengthy articles or open letters in which writers discussed, among other issues, the long-debated problem of the role of the intellectual and culture in modern society. Burns points out that on the whole literature seemed to emulate what was happening in society at large; as conventional forms of associations and political organisations broke down, literature could only provide a testimony in forms that privileged subjective experience and expression. Thus, the main production of these ‘years of tension’ seems to be represented mainly by confessional, autobiographical and diaristic writing. At the ‘periphery’ marginalised voices expressed their anger and frustration texts of ‘protest’, extremely successful at the time, but now remembered only as ‘colourful souvenirs’ of what used to be defined ‘sub-culture’. Burns’ conclusion is that in such confusing and confused times, when social and political reality, with all its different versions of plots and subplots, was so difficult to interpret as to appear ‘invented’, authors abandoned the creation of their own fictional worlds in order to scrupulously analyse the text of Italian society

Experiences of bodily disorder in French books 1573-1592

Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger and Elizabeth Grosz, in Volatile Bodies concur that the human body whose boundaries are traversed or transgressed is troubling, threatening and risky. The threats to which Douglas and Grosz separately refer are largely ideological and cultural threats, but their identification of the problematic nature of ruptured or unusual bodily boundaries is nevertheless relevant to the analysis of the actual bodily disorder with which this thesis is concerned. Disease, cannibalism and monstrosity are forms of bodily behaviour or conditions in which boundaries are inherently, or are rendered, unclear, and in the sixteenth-century books of Ambroise Paré, Jean de Léry and Michel de Montaigne, the question of the disorderly nature of these three physical phenomena is addressed. A fundamental feature of the books produced by these three writers is the emphasis on the experience of the form of bodily disorder in question on which the written account is based. Paré, a surgeon, treated plague patients and dissected monstrous specimens before writing about his experiences in his Œuvres completes', Léry observed the practice of cannibalism in Brazil before returning to Europe and witnessing the consumption of human flesh during the siege of Sancerre; and Montaigne, whose final essay is significantly entitled 'De ľexperience', develops a method of writing, or essaying, which involves the writer attempting to evaluate critically all received experiences and information before arriving at his own conclusion. The depiction of cannibalism, monstrosity and disease in the books of these three writers will be examined using a methodology developed around the principles of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. The particular relevance of this literary theory to the theme of the disordered body in French sixteenth-century books is the emphasis that Bakhtm also places on the writer's experience of his subject matter. In addition, Bakhtm argues that writers experience an impulse to consummate, in other words to define, explain and contextualise, and present as complete the world they observe. This thesis argues that the question of bodily boundaries raised by Douglas and Grosz can be addressed by Bakhtinian theory, and seeks to illustrate the ways in which Paré, Léry and Montaigne exhibit an awareness of the problem of the disordered body, and develop narrative strategies to overcome it which correspond to the functions of a Bakhtinian Author

Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery

dann J. Broyld offers a “pivotal new understanding of the geopolitics and the confluences of the Underground Railroad and Black mobility, identity, and abolitionism on both sides of the American-Canadian border in Western New York

Characterization of single-crystal synthetic diamond for multi-watt continuous-wave Raman lasers

A continuous-wave diamond Raman laser is demonstrated with an output power of 5.1 W at 1217 nm. This Raman laser is intracavity pumped by a side-pumped Nd:YLF rod laser: a 43-fold brightness enhancement between the Nd:YLF and diamond Raman lasers is observed, with the M2 beam propagation factor of the diamond Raman laser measured to be <; 1.2. Although higher output powers are demonstrated in a similar configuration using KGd(WO4)2 (KGW) as the Raman laser material (6.1 W), the brightness enhancement is much lower (2.5 fold) due to the poorer beam quality of the KGW Raman laser (M2 <; 6). The Raman gain coefficient of single-crystal synthetic diamond at a pump wavelength of 1064-nm is also measured: a maximum value of 21±2 cm/GW is returned compared to 5.7±0.5 cm/GW for KGW at the same wavelength