Locating Community among People with Schizophrenia living in a Diverse Urban Environment

Increasing the community participation of people with severe mental illness is a primary goal of recovery-oriented services. Despite this emphasis, the construct of community remains understudied and poorly articulated. This study provides an in-depth examination of the experiences, beliefs, behaviors, and spaces that constitute community participation for a highly diverse group of people with schizophrenia who are urban dwellers. An in-depth, longitudinal qualitative design was employed with 30 individuals with schizophrenia residing in inner-city neighborhoods in Canada’s largest city. For these individuals, community participation is a dynamic process, shaped by illness and non-illness-associated social relationships and spaces, self-concept, and the resources accessible to the person. The complexity of factors that are associated with “community” for people with schizophrenia, with overlays of culture, poverty, victimization, and discrimination, calls for a critical examination of the community rhetoric employed in practice and policy contexts

A Qualitative Description of Community Service, Business and Organization Perspectives on Mental Illness and Inclusion

While stigma associated with mental illness is pervasive, less is known about community stakeholder perspectives on inclusion and exclusion. This study provides a qualitative analysis of the mental-illness related experiences and perspectives of individuals who form much of the fabric of 'community' for individuals with severe mental illness. In-depth interviews were conducted with a diverse group of 94 key community stakeholders in 5 neighbourhoods in a large Canadian urban centre. Qualitative analysis revealed a range of strategies that were used to foster inclusive spaces, the dilemmas that attended more severe forms of mental illness, and the importance of the meanings ascribed to mental illness in determining responses. revealed emphases placed upon positioning mental illness in determining responses, efforts made to foster inclusive spaces, and the dilemmas that attend more severe representations of mental illness in community spaces. Differences in response as a function of stakeholder group were also explored. There exist very promising resources and diverse perspectives on inclusion in urban communities that warrant further investigation given the intensive emphasis upon ‘community’ in policy and practice dialogues

Defining novel functions for cerebrospinal fluid in ALS pathophysiology

Despite the considerable progress made towards understanding ALS pathophysiology, several key features of ALS remain unexplained, from its aetiology to its epidemiological aspects. The glymphatic system, which has recently been recognised as a major clearance pathway for the brain, has received considerable attention in several neurological conditions, particularly Alzheimer's disease. Its significance in ALS has, however, been little addressed. This perspective article therefore aims to assess the possibility of CSF contribution in ALS by considering various lines of evidence, including the abnormal composition of ALS-CSF, its toxicity and the evidence for impaired CSF dynamics in ALS patients. We also describe a potential role for CSF circulation in determining disease spread as well as the importance of CSF dynamics in ALS neurotherapeutics. We propose that a CSF model could potentially offer additional avenues to explore currently unexplained features of ALS, ultimately leading to new treatment options for people with ALS.</p

Highly integrated workflows for exploring cardiovascular conditions: Exemplars of precision medicine in Alzheimer's disease and aortic dissection

For precision medicine to be implemented through the lens of in silico technology, it is imperative that biophysical research workflows offer insight into treatments that are specific to a particular illness and to a particular subject. The boundaries of precision medicine can be extended using multiscale, biophysics-centred workflows that consider the fundamental underpinnings of the constituents of cells and tissues and their dynamic environments. Utilising numerical techniques that can capture the broad spectrum of biological flows within complex, deformable and permeable organs and tissues is of paramount importance when considering the core prerequisites of any state-of-the-art precision medicine pipeline. In this work, a succinct breakdown of two precision medicine pipelines developed within two Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) projects are given. The first workflow is targeted on the trajectory of Alzheimer's Disease, and caters for novel hypothesis testing through a multicompartmental poroelastic model which is integrated with a high throughput imaging workflow and subject-specific blood flow variability model. The second workflow gives rise to the patient specific exploration of Aortic Dissections via a multi-scale and compliant model, harnessing imaging, computational fluid-dynamics (CFD) and dynamic boundary conditions. Results relating to the first workflow include some core outputs of the multiporoelastic modelling framework, and the representation of peri-arterial swelling and peri-venous drainage solution fields. The latter solution fields were statistically analysed for a cohort of thirty-five subjects (stratified with respect to disease status, gender and activity level). The second workflow allowed for a better understanding of complex aortic dissection cases utilising both a rigid-wall model informed by minimal and clinically common datasets as well as a moving-wall model informed by rich datasets

Pregnant Plurisexual Women's Sexual and Relationship Histories across the Life Span: A Qualitative Study

Women identifying as plurisexual (i.e., those with the potential for attraction to more than one gender) experience unique issues associated with forming and maintaining intimate relationships. In particular, women identifying as plurisexual, unlike women identifying as monosexual, navigate choices and decisions related to the gender of their partners throughout their lifetime and may experience a variety of social pressures and constraints that influence these decisions. However, previous research on women\u27s sexual and relationship trajectories has largely focused on adolescence and young adulthood, and therefore we know little about the experiences of women identifying as plurisexual at other life stages. The aim of this study was to profile the lifetime sexual and relationship trajectories of 29 different-gender partnered women identifying as plurisexual as described during pregnancy. The authors identified three primary types of trajectories: women who predominantly partnered with men, women who partnered with men and women about equally, and women who predominantly partnered with women, and found that various contextual factors, including heterosexism and monosexism, constrained women\u27s opportunities for partnering with women. Implications for social and clinical interventions are discussed

Temperature regulation and microhabitat choice by free-ranging Galapagos fur seal pups (Arctocephalus galapagoensis)

Limberger D, Trillmich F, Biebach H, Stevenson RD. Temperature regulation and microhabitat choice by free-ranging Galapagos fur seal pups (Arctocephalus galapagoensis). Oecologia. 1986;69(1):53-59