Alternative research strategies in the exercise - mental health relationship

From the numerous investigations available, there is cautious support for the proposition that exercise is associated with enhanced emotion and mood in mental illness, but the strength of the conclusions derived from the empirical findings available will largely depend on the strength of the designs applied. In applied research, such as the investigation of the exercise - mental health relationship, this relationship depends on population, environmental and individual characteristics and a number of difficulties will certainly hinder progress in this area of inquiry. Randomised controlled trials are important but have the disadvantage of deemphasizing the importance of the individual. Single-case designs on the other hand have considerable potential to adequately unravel the mechanisms at work in the exercise - mental health relationship. From a clinical perspective however, research findings should be viewed based on the support of earlier epidemiological evidence, suggesting that mental illness indeed might be associated with low activity/fitness and that those who maintain activity are less likely to develop mental illness

Volition of new boundaries, absence of old boundaries?

Can we talk of an absence of old boundaries and, at the same time, of a volition for new boundaries? Or is it still the same space, that is, a shared boundary where our similarity is their difference? In this article, the author proposes the boundary as a metaphor to examine its porosity and resistance in a world of increasing mobilities, circulations and flows. This boundary viewed as metaphor continues to exert a desire to distance oneself from others, a distancing that has not gone away in spite of the fact that today’s world is commonly described as a world without boundaries. Nevertheless, mobility and transience impose a need to reinterpret that articulation of the volition of boundaries and their absence, a need to consider interdependence once again, and the way in which we categorise the inside/outside, or the centre and the periphery