My career chapter as a tool for reflective practice

This paper addresses reflective practice in research and practice and takes the issue of consciousness of social class in vocational psychology as a working example. It is argued that the discipline’s appreciation of social class can be advanced through application of the qualitative research method autoethnography. Excerpts from an autoethnographic study are used to explore the method’s potential. This reflexive research method is presented as a potential vehicle to improve vocational psychologists’ own class consciousness, and to concomitantly enhance their capacity to grasp social class within their own spheres of research and practice. It is recommended that autoethnography be used for research, training, and professional development for vocational psychologists

Attempted endocytosis of nano-environment produced by colloidal lithography by human fibroblasts

Control of the cells' nanoenvironment is likely to be important in the future of cell and tissue engineering. Microtopography has been shown to provide cues to cells that elicit a large range of cell responses, including control of adhesion, morphology, apoptosis and gene regulations. Now, researchers are focusing on nanotopography as techniques such as colloidal and electron beam lithography and polymer demixing have become available. In this study, human fibroblast response to nanocolumns (160-nm high, 100-nm diameter, 230-nm centre–centre spacing) produced by colloidal lithography are considered. Using electron microscopy and immunofluorescence to image the cytoskeleton, clathrin and dynamin, it was observed that the cells try to endocytose the nanocolumns. It also appeared that a small population of the cells changed to unusual morphologies with macrophage-like processes and highly disrupted cytoskeleton. These observations could have implications for nanomaterials science in areas such as cell transfection and drug delivery

Does Combined Antipsychotic Treatment Provide Better Control on Symptoms in Patients with Schizophrenia than the Monotherapy?

Objective: Combined antipsychotic treatment is frequently used in clinical practice either to improve the symptom control or to reduce the severity of side effects. The expected benefits by combining different antipsychotics include active cross-titration and co-utilization of different administration routes of the therapeutic agents. However, except the add-on therapies to clozapine, there is no objective evidence implying the superiority of combined therapy over monotherapy. Furthermore, there are a number of published case reports of significant side effects accompanying combined antipsychotic usage such as extrapyramidal and metabolic symptoms, seizures, and electrocardiographic abnormalities. It is also argued that switching into a new therapeutic agent might be more beneficial than augmenting the ongoing medication by polypharmacy. Here, we studied on a group of hospitalized schizophrenia patients in a training and research hospital in Turkey whether the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) scores differ between the patients under monotherapy and combined therapy