‘Is Gold Dust to My Mind’: Exploring Lived Experience in Social Work Education

The involvement of people with lived experience (service participants) is mandatory within UK social work education, although the form this takes varies significantly between organisations. This article outlines the final phase of a two-year research project focused on understanding the mechanisms which support and develop the meaningful and sustainable involvement of people with lived experience in social work education within a Higher Education Institution and a Local Authority Teaching Partnership in the East of England. The research team worked collaboratively using co-production principles and possessed lived experience backgrounds. This article presents findings from a qualitative study using interviews and questionnaires that aimed to deepen understanding of the concept and practice of embedding lived experience in social work education. Thematic analysis identified a dedicated role with the motivation and drive to achieve sustained inclusion in creative ways was the underpinning of meaningful and sustainable lived experience involvement. This was alongside opportunities to shape diverse and relational learning experiences, values reflecting compassionate and respectful relationships, and power sharing, accompanied by practical resources, can create a culture change. Together, these principles, practices and values have been instrumental in creating meaningful and sustainable lived experience involvement within social work education

Ethanol reversal of tolerance to the respiratory depressant effects of morphine

Opioids are the most common drugs associated with unintentional drug overdose. Death results from respiratory depression. Prolonged use of opioids results in the development of tolerance but the degree of tolerance is thought to vary between different effects of the drugs. Many opioid addicts regularly consume alcohol (ethanol), and post-mortem analyses of opioid overdose deaths have revealed an inverse correlation between blood morphine and ethanol levels. In the present study, we determined whether ethanol reduced tolerance to the respiratory depressant effects of opioids. Mice were treated with opioids (morphine, methadone, or buprenorphine) for up to 6 days. Respiration was measured in freely moving animals breathing 5% CO(2) in air in plethysmograph chambers. Antinociception (analgesia) was measured as the latency to remove the tail from a thermal stimulus. Opioid tolerance was assessed by measuring the response to a challenge dose of morphine (10 mg/kg i.p.). Tolerance developed to the respiratory depressant effect of morphine but at a slower rate than tolerance to its antinociceptive effect. A low dose of ethanol (0.3 mg/kg) alone did not depress respiration but in prolonged morphine-treated animals respiratory depression was observed when ethanol was co-administered with the morphine challenge. Ethanol did not alter the brain levels of morphine. In contrast, in methadone- or buprenorphine-treated animals no respiratory depression was observed when ethanol was co-administered along with the morphine challenge. As heroin is converted to morphine in man, selective reversal of morphine tolerance by ethanol may be a contributory factor in heroin overdose deaths

Letter from London, on Chris Petit, Abbas Kiarostami, Lynne Ramsay, Iain Sinclair, J. G. Ballard, and Surveillance Cinema

Letter from Londo