"Nothing has convinced me to stop" Young people's perceptions and experiences of persistant offending

Nothing Has Convinced Me To Stop results from the former Scottish Executive tasking the project with consulting young people about persistent offending. The report explores the views and experiences of those living in residential care about how and why they persistently offend, what contributes to their offending behaviour escalating and what helps them to reduce it or indeed stop offending. The consultation focused on areas with high concentrations of 'persistent offenders' in residential care, consulting young people living in various settings - residential units, residential schools, secure units and young offender institutions

All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and pre-reflective awareness of self that leads to a loss of ‘grip’ (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett’s writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell’s argument that immunity of the first person to error—Sydney Shoemaker’s foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun—is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett’s writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasi-psychotic experiences represented

Putting it down to experience : ageing and the subject in Sartre, Munro and Coetzee

This article will consider the kind of experience represented by old age, and whether we learn through this experience, or whether it falls outside our capacity or inclination to theorise and understand. It will look at ageing, and in particular ageing for women, through the lens of Sartrean philosophy – in relation to Sartre’s scepticism about gaining knowledge or character through simply living longer, and in relation to his position (endorsed by Simone de Beauvoir) that the body is no more than a necessary obstacle that might hamper our efforts to grasp the world (especially if we are women). In the light of the reflections on ageing and gender in Sartre and Beauvoir’s thought, it will use Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s model of the ‘midlife progress narrative’ to consider experience, knowledge and character in female ageing in the fiction of Alice Munro (‘Lichen’ [1985] and ‘Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass’ [1988]) and J.M. Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello [1999])

Samuel Beckett and the contingency of old age

This article explores the ‘best chance’ for aesthetic inspiration and experiment that old age—as an experience and a concept—might offer to Samuel Beckett. It considers the way in which the period of advanced old age might elude conventional narrative structures, and why Beckett might find this suggestive. Finally, it examines the tensions that emerge in Beckett’s writings between philosophical treatments of temporality and contingency in relation to finitude, and the lived experience of temporal phenomena at the end of life

"This isn't the road I want to go down" Young people's perceptions and experiences of secure care

The consultation sought to map young people's secure journey ie. their experiences and views of secure care from admission through to final discharge, including the transition from secure care and the services they received to assist them in that transition. It centred on four broad themes intended to elicit young people's individual experiences and perceptions regarding: admission to secure care, time in secure care, exit from secure care, and reflections once left secure care

MicroRNAs as a Biomarker in Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis remains a global health challenge. New biomarkers that support rapid and accurate TB diagnosis are urgently needed. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that have recently come into prominence as promising biomarkers. This thesis explores the application of miRNAs as biomarkers in tuberculosis and explores their expression in macrophages. Using real-time quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction panels we investigated the expression of 175 miRNAs in a test set of 20 pulmonary TB patients and 20 healthy controls. 87 miRNAs were differentially regulated. Ten miRNAs were selected for validation in a larger cohort with newly diagnosed pulmonary TB sampled before the commencement of antibiotic therapy and then over the course of therapy. From the ten miRNAs selected, five were differentially regulated in newly diagnosed TB subjects. The capacity of M. tuberculosis to modulate miRNA expression in human macrophages was examined. Seven miRNAs were examined in human macrophages with and without M. tuberculosis infection. The expression of miRNA in M. tuberculosis infected macrophages largely mirrored the findings from the plasma with a few exceptions. Based on the findings from this work, miRNAs demonstrate great promise in their role as a potential biomarker for TB diagnostics

Palliative care: promoting general practice participation

Specialist palliative care services and services involved in the pre-palliative phase of a patient’s disease must accept GPs as an integral part of the care tea