Recovery approaches in mental health : A qualitative evaluation of the Whole Life Therapy programme for persons with schizophrenia

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International LicenseThe recovery approach within mental health services has in recent years been influential in promoting more active participation from service users concerning their treatment and progress, within a move towards models of interventions based on social models and ideas of service user empowerment. Although mental health recovery models are often heralded as ideological goals, comparatively little has been documented about the means of achieving these. This article sets out the nature and content of the Whole Life Programme, used within the Hertfordshire NHS Partnership Foundation Trust, and the results of qualitative research into the programme that set out to analyse the impact of its delivery from the perspectives of service users. The research examined the experiences and views of participants receiving treatment several months after the completion of the programme, and also of those who withdrew prematurely, in order to learn from these experiences, adding to our understanding of how one recovery based approach, the Whole Life Manual, can be applied in practiceNon peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Food Miles: Environmental Protection or Veiled Protectionism?

This article examines the international trade, environmental, and development implications of campaigns to convince consumers to make food purchases based on food miles. Buying food from nearby sources has become a popular objective. One of the unmistakable messages of the “locavore” movement is that importing food – particularly food that comes from far away – causes environmental harm. The theory is that transporting food long distances results in the release of high levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere and is thus a dangerous contributor to climate change. Proponents of this view therefore argue that “food miles” – the distance food travels from farm to plate – should be kept to a minimum. The problem is that in reality, food miles are a poor proxy for environmental harm. Studies have demonstrated that differences in farming methods as well as natural factor endowments can mean that growing some products locally may in fact result in more GHG emissions than importing those same products. Notwithstanding this disconnect, legislators frequently propose policies based on food miles. Were a government to permit discrimination on the basis of food miles, or to otherwise endorse such a policy through its actions, it could be vulnerable to a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute resolution challenge. We first explain the term “food miles”, and how the concept has been used around the world. Second, it addresses the use of food miles as an indicator of environmental harm. We argue that food miles are in fact a poor proxy of such harm, and therefore should not be used. Part III considers whether food miles labeling currently in use as well as legislation that has been proposed could be successfully challenged through a WTO dispute settlement proceeding. Our analysis includes a detailed examination of the three 2012 Appellate Body decisions addressing the TBT Agreement, US – Clove Cigarettes; US – Country of Origin Labeling (US-COOL); and US-Tuna II (Mexico), and as such will be one of the first articles to engage in such an assessment. Fourth, we address the implications for developing countries of actions taken to reduce food miles. And finally, we examine and critique alternatives to food miles for those wishing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through farming and food consumption

Food Miles: Environmental Protection or Veiled Protectionism?

This article examines the international trade, environmental, and development implications of campaigns to convince consumers to make food purchases based on food miles. Buying food from nearby sources has become a popular objective. One of the unmistakable messages of the “locavore” movement is that importing food – particularly food that comes from far away – causes environmental harm. The theory is that transporting food long distances results in the release of high levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere and is thus a dangerous contributor to climate change. Proponents of this view therefore argue that “food miles” – the distance food travels from farm to plate – should be kept to a minimum. The problem is that in reality, food miles are a poor proxy for environmental harm. Studies have demonstrated that differences in farming methods as well as natural factor endowments can mean that growing some products locally may in fact result in more GHG emissions than importing those same products. Notwithstanding this disconnect, legislators frequently propose policies based on food miles. Were a government to permit discrimination on the basis of food miles, or to otherwise endorse such a policy through its actions, it could be vulnerable to a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute resolution challenge. We first explain the term “food miles”, and how the concept has been used around the world. Second, it addresses the use of food miles as an indicator of environmental harm. We argue that food miles are in fact a poor proxy of such harm, and therefore should not be used. Part III considers whether food miles labeling currently in use as well as legislation that has been proposed could be successfully challenged through a WTO dispute settlement proceeding. Our analysis includes a detailed examination of the three 2012 Appellate Body decisions addressing the TBT Agreement, US – Clove Cigarettes; US – Country of Origin Labeling (US-COOL); and US-Tuna II (Mexico), and as such will be one of the first articles to engage in such an assessment. Fourth, we address the implications for developing countries of actions taken to reduce food miles. And finally, we examine and critique alternatives to food miles for those wishing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through farming and food consumption

The lexicon of Proto Oceanic : the culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society 3: Plants

This is the second in a series of five volumes on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic, the ancestor of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian language family. Each volume deals with a particular domain of culture and/or environment and consists of a collection of essays each of which presents and comments on lexical reconstructions of a particular semantic field within that domain. Volume 2 examines how Proto Oceanic speakers described their geophysical environment. An introductory chapter discusses linguistic and archaeological evidence that locates the Proto Oceanic language community in the Bismarck Archipelago in the late 2nd millennium BC. The next three chapters investigate terms used to denote inland, coastal, reef and open sea environments, and meteorological phenomena. A further chapter examines the lexicon for features of the heavens and navigational techniques associated with the stars. How Proto Oceanic speakers talked about their environment is also described in three further chapters which treat property terms for describing inanimate objects, locational and directional terms, and terms related to the expression of time

Absorptive transport of amino acids by the rat colon.

The capacity of the colon to absorb microbially produced amino acids (AAs) and the underlying mechanisms of AA transport are incompletely defined. We measured the profile of 16 fecal AAs along the rat ceco-colonic axis and compared unidirectional absorptive AA fluxes across mucosal tissues isolated from the rat jejunum, cecum, and proximal colon using an Ussing chamber approach, in conjunction with 1H-NMR and ultra-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry chemical analyses. Passage of stool from cecum to midcolon was associated with segment-specific changes in fecal AA composition and a decrease in total AA content. Simultaneous measurement of up to 16 AA fluxes under native luminal conditions, with correction for endogenous AA release, demonstrated absorptive transfer of AAs across the cecum and proximal colon at rates comparable (30-80%) to those across the jejunum, with significant Na+-dependent and H+-stimulated components. Expression profiling of 30 major AA transporter genes by quantitative PCR revealed comparatively high levels of transcripts for 20 AA transporters in the cecum and/or colon, with the levels of 12 exceeding those in the small intestine. Our results suggest a more detailed model of major apical and basolateral AA transporters in rat colonocytes and provide evidence for a previously unappreciated transfer of AAs across the colonic epithelium that could link the prodigious metabolic capacities of the luminal microbiota, the colonocytes, and the body tissues.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study provides evidence for a previously unappreciated transfer of microbially generated amino acids across the colonic epithelium under physiological conditions that could link the prodigious metabolic capacities of the luminal microbiota, the colonocytes, and the body tissues. The segment-specific expression of at least 20 amino acid transporter genes along the colon provides a detailed mechanistic basis for uniport, heteroexchange, Na+-cotransport, and H+-cotransport components of colonic amino acid absorption

How Well Can We Predict Wildlife Corridors? Tests of Alternative Modeling Approaches in Migratory Elk and Dispersing Wolverines

Landscape connectivity has become a key focus of conservation biology as natural habitat is increasingly fragmented by human land use. Several landscape modeling approaches are now relied upon to identify likely dispersal and migration corridors and guide conservation planning. However, the predictive accuracy of these methods has seen limited testing against empirical movement data, which limits confidence in their utility and confuses selection of appropriate methods for a given application. To address these issues, we used GPS collar data from migrating elk and dispersing wolverines to evaluate the ability of common modeling approaches (cost-distance/least-cost path models and circuit theory models) to predict observed movement routes. While both methods made generally similar predictions, cost-distance models consistently outperformed circuit theory models, and predictive success was much higher for elk than for wolverine movements. Furthermore, the form and complexity of underlying landscape resistance maps influenced model performance and revealed unforeseen differences between models. These findings illustrate that corridor model performance depends greatly on focal species and landscape characteristics as well as selection of appropriate methods for the application at hand