Age differences in mental health literacy

BACKGROUND: The community's knowledge and beliefs about mental health problems, their risk factors, treatments and sources of help may vary as a function of age. METHODS: Data were taken from an epidemiological survey conducted during 2003–2004 with a national clustered sample of Australian adults aged 18 years and over. Following the presentation of a vignette describing depression (n = 1001) or schizophrenia (n = 997), respondents were asked a series of questions relating to their knowledge and recognition of the disorder, beliefs about the helpfulness of treating professionals and medical, psychological and lifestyle treatments, and likely causes. RESULTS: Participant age was coded into five categories and cross-tabulated with mental health literacy variables. Comparisons between age groups revealed that although older adults (70+ years) were poorer than younger age groups at correctly recognising depression and schizophrenia, young adults (18–24 years) were more likely to misidentify schizophrenia as depression. Differences were also observed between younger and older age groups in terms of beliefs about the helpfulness of certain treating professionals and medical and lifestyle treatments for depression and schizophrenia, and older respondents were more likely to believe that schizophrenia could be caused by character weakness. CONCLUSION: Differences in mental health literacy across the adult lifespan suggest that more specific, age appropriate messages about mental health are required for younger and older age groups. The tendency for young adults to 'over-identify' depression signals the need for awareness campaigns to focus on differentiation between mental disorders

Effect of continuous gamma-ray exposure on performance of learned tasks and effect of subsequent fractionated exposures on blood-forming tissue

Sixteen monkeys trained to perform continuous and discrete-avoidance and fixed-ratio tasks with visual and auditory cues were performance-tested before, during, and after 10-day gamma-ray exposures totaling 0, 500, 750, and 1000 rads. Approximately 14 months after the performance-test exposures, surviving animals were exposed to 100-rad gamma-ray fractions at 56-day intervals to observe injury and recovery patterns of blood-forming tissues. The fixed-ratio, food-reward task performance showed a transient decline in all dose groups within 24 hours of the start of gamma-ray exposure, followed by recovery to normal food-consumption levels within 48 to 72 hours. Avoidance tasks were performed successfully by all groups during the 10-day exposure, but reaction times of the two higher dose-rate groups in which animals received 3 and 4 rads per hour or total doses of 750 and 1000 rads, respectively, were somewhat slower

Generalized Forward-Backward Splitting with Penalization for Monotone Inclusion Problems

We introduce a generalized forward-backward splitting method with penalty term for solving monotone inclusion problems involving the sum of a finite number of maximally monotone operators and the normal cone to the nonempty set of zeros of another maximal monotone operator. We show weak ergodic convergence of the generated sequence of iterates to a solution of the considered monotone inclusion problem, provided the condition corresponded to the Fitzpatrick function of the operator describing the set of the normal cone is fulfilled. Under strong monotonicity of an operator, we show strong convergence of the iterates. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed method for minimizing a large-scale hierarchical minimization problem concerning the sum of differentiable and nondifferentiable convex functions subject to the set of minima of another differentiable convex function. We illustrate the functionality of the method through numerical experiments addressing constrained elastic net and generalized Heron location problems

Positrons from Primordial Black Hole Microquasars and Gamma-ray Bursts

We propose several novel scenarios how capture of small sublunar-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) by compact stars, white dwarfs or neutron stars, can lead to distinct short gamma-ray bursts (sGRBs) as well as microquasars (MQs). In addition to providing new signatures, relativistic jets from these systems will accelerate positrons to high energies. We find that if PBHs constitute a sizable fraction of DM, they can significantly contribute to the excess observed in the positron flux by the Pamela, the AMS-02 and the Fermi-LAT experiments. Our proposal combines the beneficial features of astrophysical sources and dark matter.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, v2: significant revisions, published version, Physics Letters B (2018

Of Ivory Columns and Glass Ceilings: The Impact of the Supreme Court of the United States on the Practice of Women Attorneys in Law Firms Comment.

This Commentary examines the effect United States Supreme Court decisions on sex discrimination in the legal profession. Discrimination against women currently appears to be alive and well in the legal field. Decisions like Bradwell v. Illinois and In re Lockwood frustrated women attorneys for over a century, allowing states to determine women were unfit for occupations in areas like law. Hishon v. King & Spalding, and later, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, applied Title VII protections to evaluations of potential law firm partners—a process previously closed and unassailable for most of the history of the legal profession. More recently, Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. reinforced the need for sexual harassment prevention policies. Part II of this Commentary presents a historical overview of women’s struggles to gain access to law schools and admission to the bar. Part III describes changes in law firm employment practices, and Part IV discusses the Court’s decisions involving discrimination in partnership decisions of professional firms. Part V concludes that while the Court prohibited the most overt forms of sex discrimination in professional partnership decisions, subtle and unconscious bias still exists in the legal profession. The Court’s decisions acknowledge that gender discrimination does exist at the upper echelons of law firms and other professional organizations. Furthermore, those decisions give notice that partners are exposed to liability when they allow bias to motivate employment decisions. The most important function the Supreme Court may perform is to continue to remind all who go before the bar that discrimination is insidious and destructive. This bias affects women’s careers as well as the legal profession, which stands to lose not only dedicated and talented professionals, but the respect of the public it exists to represent

Soil Microbial Networks Shift Across a High-Elevation Successional Gradient.

While it is well established that microbial composition and diversity shift along environmental gradients, how interactions among microbes change is poorly understood. Here, we tested how community structure and species interactions among diverse groups of soil microbes (bacteria, fungi, non-fungal eukaryotes) change across a fundamental ecological gradient, succession. Our study system is a high-elevation alpine ecosystem that exhibits variability in successional stage due to topography and harsh environmental conditions. We used hierarchical Bayesian joint distribution modeling to remove the influence of environmental covariates on species distributions and generated interaction networks using the residual species-to-species variance-covariance matrix. We hypothesized that as ecological succession proceeds, diversity will increase, species composition will change, and soil microbial networks will become more complex. As expected, we found that diversity of most taxonomic groups increased over succession, and species composition changed considerably. Interestingly, and contrary to our hypothesis, interaction networks became less complex over succession (fewer interactions per taxon). Interactions between photosynthetic microbes and any other organism became less frequent over the gradient, whereas interactions between plants or soil microfauna and any other organism were more abundant in late succession. Results demonstrate that patterns in diversity and composition do not necessarily relate to patterns in network complexity and suggest that network analyses provide new insight into the ecology of highly diverse, microscopic communities