A qualitative study exploring the experience and motivations of UK Samaritan volunteers: "Why do we do it?"

Telephone helplines offer a valued service for those in distress. However, little research has explored the experience of helpline volunteers. Through semi-structured interviews, in this article we explore the volunteering experiences of nine long-term UK Samaritan volunteers. Interviews were analysed using Interpretive Interactionism. The analysis highlighted that this volunteering impacted participants' experience of their sense of self. The decision to volunteer was framed as part of a search for personal meaning, tied to experiences of loss and reparation. They reflected positively on their volunteer identity, but highlighted tensions between a sense of vocation and the experience of care burden. The Samaritan Community also offered a sense of belonging and social support. They experienced involvement as personally meaningful, enabling the construction of a positive self-identity

Children’s embodied experience of living with domestic violence: ‘I’d go into my panic, and shake, really bad’

Children who experience domestic violence are often described in academic and professional literature as passive victims, whose ‘exposure’ to violence and abuse at home leaves them psychologically damaged, socially impaired, inarticulate, cognitively ‘concrete’ and emotionally ‘incompetent’. Whilst we recognise the importance of understanding the hurt, disruption and damage that domestic violence can cause, we also explore alternative possible ways of talking about and thinking about the lives of children who have experienced domestic violence. We report on interviews and drawings with 27 UK children, using interpretive analysis to explore their capacity for agency and resistance. We explore the paradoxical interplay of children’s acceptance and resistance to coercive control, paying specific attention to embodied experience and use of space. We consider how children articulate their experiences of pain and coercion, how they position themselves as embodied and affective subjects, and challenge Scarry’s (1985) suggestion that embodied pain and violence are inexpressible

Masculinities and emotional expression in UK Servicemen: 'Big boys don't cry'?

Dominant discourses of military servicemen position them as more prone to psychological damage than the general population, but as reluctant to seek psychological assistance, because of the military culture of ‘toughness’, a military masculinity, that values stoicism, emotional control and invulnerability and implicitly excludes ‘feminine’ characteristics like emotionality. This is seen as a barrier to military personnel seeking help, by implicitly discouraging emotional disclosure and expression. This article presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with six male military and ex-military personnel, focused on their experience and understandings of emotion, emotional expression and ‘mental health’ in the military. The dominant construction of military masculinity certainly renders some forms of emotion inexpressible within certain contexts. However, we argue that the construct is more complex than a simple exclusion of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘emotional’. We explore how the highly masculine notions of military solidarity and 'brotherhood' create a ‘safe’ masculine space within which men could share their emotional experiences, but also highlight how this space for emotional expression is relatively constrained. We argue that these notions of solidarity and brotherhood open a space for emotional connection and expression that must be respected and worked with creatively, in therapeutic and other interventions

Freedom, Goodness, Power, and Belonging: The Semantics of Phobic, Obsessive-Compulsive, Eating, and Mood Disorders

Are the semantics of “freedom,” “goodness,” “power,” and “belonging” characteristic of the stories narrated in psychotherapy by individuals respectively with phobic, obsessive-compulsive, eating, and mood disorders? To verify this hypothesis, put forward by Ugazio's model of semantic polarities, the Family Semantics Grid (FSG) was applied to the transcripts of 120 individual video-recorded systemic therapy sessions, the first two sessions carried out with 60 patients with phobic (12), obsessive-compulsive (12), eating (12), and mood (12) disorders and asymptomatic patients (12) with existential problems who made up the comparison group. The results confirm the hypothesis. All but one patient were correctly assigned to their diagnostic group only by drawing on their narrated semantics. The semantics alone therefore seem capable of defining the correct diagnostic group to which each patient belongs. We suggest considering the semantics as contextual and cultural diagnostic dimensions, expressions of the bonds but also of the resources of people, and above all useful for a diagnosis aimed at fostering processes of transformation and change

Tattooed female bodies: Considerations from the literature

In this article, we present an overview of literature that explores tattooed female bodies. Focusing particularly on literature on femininities and embodiment, we consider how tattooed women’s bodies are read culturally, and the implications of this reading for our further understanding of the social construction of femininities. We explore how hegemonic notions of femininities and embodiment intersect in our cultural reading of women’s tattooed bodies. To conclude, we look at how femininities and embodiment are important in under- standing how femininity is constituted, how women experience their tattooed bodies differently, and what this means in terms of how the body is read culturally

Toward the recovery of a sense of self: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of patients' experience of body-oriented psychotherapy for schizophrenia

Objective: Increasing evidence supports the efficacy of body-oriented psychotherapy for schizophrenia. Yet, so far no research has investigated outcome in relation to therapy process: why and how body-oriented psychotherapy is effective. In this study we qualitatively explore participants’ experience of a manualized body-oriented psychotherapy (BPT) for schizophrenia to shed light on the process of therapeutic change. Method: We conducted in-depth interviews with 6 participants who completed a 10-week BPT group intervention. Interviews explored participants’ experience of change and helpful aspects of therapy and were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings: We identified 6 master themes across the interviews: (a) Being a whole: body-mind connection; (b) Being agentic and being able; (c) Being unique and worthy: being accepted for who one is; (d) Changing interactions: engaging in authentic interpersonal contact; (e) Being part of a group: feeling integrated; (f) Hope and investing in the future. Conclusion: We discuss the clinical implications for each theme and bring the findings together by describing therapeutic change in schizophrenia as a recovery of sense of self at different but interlocked levels. Moreover, we put forward recommendations for both specific and common factors for schizophrenia therapy

Hearing the silences: Adult Nigerian women's accounts of 'early marriages'

‘Early marriage’ is a relatively common but under-researched global phenomenon, associated with poor physical and mental health and educational and occupational outcomes, particularly for young girls. In this article, we draw on qualitative interviews with six Nigerian women from Sokoto state, who were married between the ages of 8 and 15. The interviews explored young women’s experiences of the transition to marriage, being married, pregnancy and their understanding of the marital and parental role. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis, we explore women’s constrained articulations of their experiences of early marriage, as they are constituted within a social context where the identity of ‘woman’ is bound up in values and practices around marriage and motherhood. We explore the complexity of ‘hearing’ women’s experiences when their identities are bound up in culturally overdetermined ideas of femininity that function explicitly to silence and constrain the spaces in which women can speak

Birth and closure of the Kallipetra Basin: Late Cretaceous reworking of the Jurassic Pelagonian-Axios/Vardar contact (northern Greece)

Some 20 Myr after the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous obduction and collision at the eastern margin of Adria, the eroded Pelagonia (Adria) Axios/Vardar (oceanic complex) contact collapsed, forming the Kallipetra Basin, described around the Aliakmon River near Veroia (northern Greece). Clastic and carbonate marine sediments deposited from the early Cenomanian to the end of the Turonian, with abundant olistoliths and slope failures at the base due to active normal faults. The middle part of the series is characterized by red and green pelagic limestones, with a minimal contribution of terrigenous debris. Rudist mounds in the upper part of the basin started forming on the southwestern slope, and their growth competed with a flux of ophiolitic debris, documenting the new fault scarps affecting the Vardar oceanic complex (VOC). Eventually, the basin was closed by overthrusting of the VOC towards the northeast and was buried and heated up to ~ 180 °C. A strong reverse geothermal gradient with temperatures increasing up-section to near 300 °C is recorded beneath the VOC by illite crystallinity and by the crystallization of chlorite during deformation. This syntectonic heat partially reset the zircon fission track ages bracketing the timing of closure just after the deposition of the ophiolitic debris in the Turonian. This study documents the reworking of the Pelagonian Axios/Vardar contact, with Cenomanian extension and basin widening followed by Turonian compression and basin inversion. Thrusting occurred earlier than previously reported in the literature for the eastern Adria and shows a vergence toward the northeast, at odds with the regional southwest vergence of the whole margin but in accordance to some reports about 50 km north