Understanding young men's experiences of seeking help for a mental health difficulty

This portfolio thesis includes three parts; a systematic literature review, an empirical study and supporting appendices.Part one, the systematic literature review, looked at the effectiveness of mental health campaigns at engaging men and analysed the factors that produce effective campaigns. A systematic search of databases resulted in nine studies being identified. A narrative synthesis was then completed along with a methodological assessment of the quality of the articles. The implications for mental health campaigns targeted at men are then explored.Part two is an empirical piece of research that used a qualitative methodology to explore the experiences of young men that had sought help for a mental health difficulty from primary care services. The theoretical and clinical implications are then discussed with considerations for future research.Part three is the appendices that support both the systematic literature review and the empirical paper. Included in the appendices is a reflective statement drawing upon experiences from the research process

Tongaat brown eggs

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Talking About Tiny Houses

This piece is a snippet of an interview from a larger research project titled: “The Social Practice of Living and Travelling in Small Mobile Living Structures”. Using a style popularised by Studs Terkel in his book ‘Working’ (1974), I have used the interviewee’s own words but manipulated the order of the sections to make a cohesive narrative about living in a Tiny House. Erin and Chris talk about life in their tiny house under the framework of Social Practice Theory, informing the reader about the skills, materials and meanings that have contributed to their current living situation

Long-term high fat feeding of rats results in increased numbers of circulating microvesicles with pro-inflammatory effects on endothelial cells

Obesity and type 2 diabetes lead to dramatically increased risks of atherosclerosis and CHD. Multiple mechanisms converge to promote atherosclerosis by increasing endothelial oxidative stress and up-regulating expression of pro-inflammatory molecules. Microvesicles (MV) are small ( < 1 μm) circulating particles that transport proteins and genetic material, through which they are able to mediate cell–cell communication and influence gene expression. Since MV are increased in plasma of obese, insulin-resistant and diabetic individuals, who often exhibit chronic vascular inflammation, and long-term feeding of a high-fat diet (HFD) to rats is a well-described model of obesity and insulin resistance, we hypothesised that this may be a useful model to study the impact of MV on endothelial inflammation. The number and cellular origin of MV from HFD-fed obese rats were characterised by flow cytometry. Total MV were significantly increased after feeding HFD compared to feeding chow (P< 0·001), with significantly elevated numbers of MV derived from leucocyte, endothelial and platelet compartments (P< 0·01 for each cell type). MV were isolated from plasma and their ability to induce reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation and vascular cell adhesion molecule (VCAM)-1 expression was measured in primary rat cardiac endothelial cells in vitro. MV from HFD-fed rats induced significant ROS (P< 0·001) and VCAM-1 expression (P= 0·0275), indicative of a pro-inflammatory MV phenotype in this model of obesity. These findings confirm that this is a useful model to further study the mechanisms by which diet can influence MV release and subsequent effects on cardio-metabolic health

Talking About Tiny Houses

This piece is a snippet of an interview from a larger research project titled: “The Social Practice of Living and Travelling in Small Mobile Living Structures”. Using a style popularised by Studs Terkel in his book ‘Working’ (1974), I have used the interviewee’s own words but manipulated the order of the sections to make a cohesive narrative about living in a Tiny House. Erin and Chris talk about life in their tiny house under the framework of Social Practice Theory, informing the reader about the skills, materials and meanings that have contributed to their current living situation

Low statistical power and overestimated anthropogenic impacts, exacerbated by publication bias, dominate field studies in global change biology

Field studies are essential to reliably quantify ecological responses to global change because they are exposed to realistic climate manipulations. Yet such studies are limited in replicates, resulting in less power and, therefore, potentially unreliable effect estimates. Furthermore, while manipulative field experiments are assumed to be more powerful than non-manipulative observations, it has rarely been scrutinized using extensive data. Here, using 3847 field experiments that were designed to estimate the effect of environmental stressors on ecosystems, we systematically quantified their statistical power and magnitude (Type M) and sign (Type S) errors. Our investigations focused upon the reliability of field experiments to assess the effect of stressors on both ecosystem's response magnitude and variability. When controlling for publication bias, single experiments were underpowered to detect response magnitude (median power: 18%–38% depending on effect sizes). Single experiments also had much lower power to detect response variability (6%–12% depending on effect sizes) than response magnitude. Such underpowered studies could exaggerate estimates of response magnitude by 2–3 times (Type M errors) and variability by 4–10 times. Type S errors were comparatively rare. These observations indicate that low power, coupled with publication bias, inflates the estimates of anthropogenic impacts. Importantly, we found that meta-analyses largely mitigated the issues of low power and exaggerated effect size estimates. Rather surprisingly, manipulative experiments and non-manipulative observations had very similar results in terms of their power, Type M and S errors. Therefore, the previous assumption about the superiority of manipulative experiments in terms of power is overstated. These results call for highly powered field studies to reliably inform theory building and policymaking, via more collaboration and team science, and large-scale ecosystem facilities. Future studies also require transparent reporting and open science practices to approach reproducible and reliable empirical work and evidence synthesis