A guide to cost-effectiveness acceptability curves

Use of cost-effectiveness acceptability curves, as a method for summarising information on uncertainty in cost-effectiveness, has become widespread within applied studies. This includes several studies in the mental health field. This editorial uses examples from recent papers to illustrate how cost-effectiveness acceptability curves are constructed, what they represent and how they should be interpreted

Economic evaluations of child and adolescent mental health interventions : a systematic review.

BACKGROUND : The need has grown over recent years for economic information on the impacts of child and adolescent mental helath problems and the cost-effectiveness of interventions. METHODS : A range of electronic databases were searched using a predefined search strategy. To identify economic studies which focused on services, pharmacological interventions and other treatments for children and adolescents with a diagnosed mental health problem or identified as at risk of mental illness. Published studies were included in the review if they assessed both costs and outcomes, with cost-effectiveness being the primary interest. Articles meeting the criteria for inclusion were assessed for quality. RESULTS : Behavioural disorders have been given relatively large attention in economic evaluations of child and adolescent mental health. These studies tentatively suggest child behavioural gains and parent satisfaction from parent and child training programmes, however the cost effectiveness of the location of delivery for behvaioural therapies is less clear. In general the quality of economic evaluations was limited by small sample sizes, a narrow conceptualisation of costs, narrow perspectives and limited statistical and econometric methods. CONCLUSIONS : Economic evaluations in the field of child and adolescent mental health services are few in number and generally poor in quality, although the number of studies being undertaken is now rising relatively quickly.

The pursuit of fulfilment: Desire in Peter Carey\u27s Illywhacker

This paper is a close textual analysis exploring the different levels at which desire is manifest in Peter Carey\u27s lllywhacker. It attempts to show how desire, and the expectation of its fulfilment, have the effect of propelling the narrative and implicating the reader in the text. It is also the aim of the paper to argue that, despite aU Ilfywhacker\u27s gestures to the contrary. and its expectation of fulfilment, at no level is this desire realized in the novel. It should be stated that this is not an evaluative judgement..

V. M. Bekhterev in Russian Child Science, 1900s-1920s: “Objective Psychology” / “Reflexology” as a Scientific Movement

In the early 20th century the child population became a major focus of scientific, professional and public interest. This led to the crystallization of a dynamic field of child science, encompassing developmental and educational psychology, child psychiatry and special education, school hygiene and mental testing, juvenile criminology and the anthropology of childhood. This article discusses the role played in child science by the eminent Russian neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev. The latter's name is associated with a distinctive program for transforming the human sciences in general and psychology in particular that he in the 1900s labelled “objective psychology” and from the 1910s renamed “reflexology.” The article examines the equivocal place that Bekhterev's “objective psychology” and “reflexology” occupied in Russian/Soviet child science in the first three decades of the 20th century. While Bekhterev's prominence in this field is beyond doubt, analysis shows that “objective psychology” and “reflexology” had much less success in mobilizing support within it than certain other movements in this arena (for example, “experimental pedagogy” in the pre-revolutionary era); it also found it difficult to compete with the variety of rival programs that arose within Soviet “pedology” during the 1920s. However, this article also demonstrates that the study of child development played a pivotal role in Bekhterev's program for the transformation of the human sciences: it was especially important to his efforts to ground in empirical phenomena and in concrete research practices a new ontology of the psychological, which, the article argues, underpinned “objective psychology”/“reflexology” as a transformative scientific movement

Picturing Jasenovac: Atrocity Photography Between Evidence and Propaganda

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 80,000 inmates, mainly Serbs, Jews and Roma, perished in Jasenovac, a brutal Ustasha–run concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia. Ever since the 1980s, Jasenovac has been one of the most contentious aspects of the memory of the Second World War in the former Yugoslavia. Controversies surrounding the number of victims and the nature and purpose of the camp, which continue to polarize the region, have been well documented. However, there has been hardly any scholarly research on the deep divisions regarding the photographic record of Jasenovac and the uses of images in the representation of the horrors of this camp. This is even though fundamental differences in the perceived importance of atrocity images permeate the dominant cultures of memory in the region, and represent an important barrier to reconciliation. In Serbia and in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska, graphic atrocity photographs are routinely used in in the mainstream press, in television documentaries, in books and exhibitions devoted to Jasenovac. One can even speak of a distinct aesthetic of memory, captured in a number of iconic images that serve to sustain the vision of the Ustashe as uniquely barbaric and evil, and of Jasenovac as the place of unimaginable cruelty. By contrast, in Croatia, atrocity images are almost completely absent from public discourse, on the grounds that their authenticity is compromised and that decades of propagandistic misuse by the Serbian side have undermined the status of atrocity photographs as a medium through which the past can be adequately represented. The chapter argues that in order to understand these different approaches to atrocity photographs, it is necessary to look beyond the socio-political circumstances of Yugoslavia in 1980s and 1990s, and the instrumentalization of history that defined that era. There is much to be gained from looking further into the past and considering the legacy of the Yugoslav State Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Committed by the Occupiers and Their Accomplices in Yugoslavia, which operated between 1944 and 1948. By offering the first detailed scholarly examination of the War Crimes Commission’s attitude to, and uses of, photographs, both generally, and in relation to Jasenovac, the chapter argues that contemporary polemics about atrocity images and their relevance echo many of the Commission’s own dilemmas regarding the role of visual evidence in documenting atrocity, about the propaganda potential and emotional power of violent images, and the ways in which images can be deployed strategically to sustain particular narratives of victimhood and villainy. Also, it shows how institutional practices through which the Commission collected photographs paved the way for many of the subsequent controversies surrounding their ‘authenticity’ and relevance as a historiographic source

Intergenerational continuity and discontinuity in cognitive ability: the first offspring of the British 1946 birth cohort

Cognitive development in childhood is a key factor affecting adult life chances, including educational and occupational success. Intergenerational continuity in cognitive ability is often observed. Thus the persistence of poor cognitive outcomes across generations may lead to a ‘cycle of disadvantage’ that is difficult to break. In this thesis, intergenerational associations in cognitive ability between parents and first-born offspring were examined longitudinally. 1,690 members of the British 1946 birth cohort with at least one offspring constituted the study sample. Cognitive ability was measured at age eight years in parents and offspring. Social mobility and parenting practices were examined for their affects on the transmission of cognitive ability across generations. Offspring of parents who improved upon the occupational social class of their own fathers by the time they were aged 26, as well as offspring of parents who remained in a non-manual class, had higher cognitive scores than those whose parents remained in a manual social class, or who showed negative intergenerational mobility. Upwardly mobile and stable non-manual parents were also more likely to use positive parenting practices. Four measures of parenting were shown to mediate part of the intergenerational relationship in cognitive ability. The intellectual home environment, parental aspirations and cognitive stimulation were positively related with cognitive outcomes in the second generation, while coercive discipline was negatively associated with offspring ability. Path analyses revealed that maternal education, but not occupation, was an important predictor of offspring cognition. The educational attainment of fathers indirectly influenced the cognitive development of the next generation through its effect on occupational social class. For those parents with the lowest and highest ability scores, the quality of the intellectual environment enabled their offspring to ‘escape’ or replicate parental cognitive ability respectively. Cognitive stimulation and paternal aspirations helped offspring to avoid repeating the poor cognitive outcomes of their parents. These data add to the relatively few studies that examine intergenerational continuity and discontinuity in cognitive ability. The results provide a basis for understanding some of the processes by which parenting practices may influence intergenerational relationships

Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c. 1880–1936

Therapy is not simply a domain or form of medical practice, but also a metaphor for and a performance of medicine, of its functions and status, of its distinctive mode of action upon the world. This article examines medical treatment or therapy (in Russian lechenie), as concept and practice, in what came to be known in Russia as defectology (defektologiia) – the discipline and occupation concerned with the study and care of children with developmental pathologies, disabilities and special needs. Defectology formed an impure, occupationally ambiguous, therapeutic field, which emerged between different types of expertise in the niche populated by children considered ‘difficult to cure’, ‘difficult to teach’, and ‘difficult to discipline’. The article follows the multiple genealogy of defectological therapeutics in the medical, pedagogical and juridical domains, across the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It argues that the distinctiveness of defectological therapeutics emerged from the tensions between its biomedical, sociopedagogical and moral-juridical framings, resulting in ambiguous hybrid forms, in which medical treatment strategically interlaced with education or upbringing, on the one hand, and moral correction, on the other