Patients' and health professionals' views on primary care for people with serious mental illness : focus group study

Objective To explore the experience of providing and receiving primary care from the perspectives of primary care health professionals and patients with serious mental illness respectively. Design Qualitative study consisting of six patient groups, six health professional groups, and six combined focus groups. Setting Six primary care trusts in the West Midlands. Participants Forty five patients with serious mental illness, 39 general practitioners (GPs), and eight practice nurses. Results Most health professionals felt that the care of people with serious mental illness was too specialised for primary care. However, most patients viewed primary care as the cornerstone of their health care and prefer-red to consult their own GP, who listened and was willing to learn, rather than be referred to a different,GP with specific mental health knowledge. Swift access was important to patients, with barriers created by the effects of the illness and the noisy or crowded waiting area. Some patients described how they exaggerated symptoms ("acted up") to negotiate an urgent appointment, a strategy that was also employed by some GPs to facilitate admission to secondary care. Most participants felt that structured reviews of care had value. However, whereas health professionals perceived serious mental illness as a lifelong condition, patients emphasised the importance of optimism in treatment and hope for recovery. Conclusions Primary care is of central importance to people with serious mental illness. The challenge for health professionals and patients is to create a system in which patients can see a health professional when they want to without needing to exaggerate their symptoms. The importance that patients attach to optimism in treatment, continuity of care, and listening skills compared with specific mental health knowledge should encourage health professionals in primary care to play a greater role in the care of patients with serious mental illness

“Wading Through Water” - Parental Experiences Of Their Child’s HE Choice Process

In an increasingly marketised and competitive UK HE environment understanding the student decision-making process has become very important. At the same time, there has been an increase in parental involvement in this choice amongst certain groups of parents. This paper examines parental accounts of their experiences and involvement in their child's HE choice process. It finds that the choice process is experienced as a form of parenting. Participants described their efforts in trying to get their child to talk to them and to achieve a balance in terms of their involvement and that of the child. This idea of relationships impacting on the choice process is one which is almost entirely missing from the choice literature and warrants further investigation. In this paper, parental experiences are examined relating to the literature on choice and student and parental decision-making within HE. The research adopts a qualitative phenomenological approach with parents focusing in detail on their actual experiences and on aspects of importance to them. HEIs should be wary of over-estimating the choice processes which students and their parents engage in and of assuming that parental involvement leads to a more thorough process

The Dignity of Human Life: Sketching Out an 'Equal Worth' Approach

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life

Arts Therapies And Psychotherapy Training: An International Survey

This paper presents a comparative analysis of data received from the dissemination of a qualitative questionnaire to 12 countries. The survey was concerned with the extent to which group therapy was incorporated into the personal development (PD) aspect of arts therapies and group psychotherapy training. It asked respondents for their rationales, which include or omit such an experience in their programme, together with details of the form, structure and orientation if it was included.Peer reviewe

Demons, devils and witches: the occult in heavy metal music

Heavy Metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer-good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, Heavy Metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, Heavy Metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British Heavy Metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British Heavy Metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analysis of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of Heavy Metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analysis that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture