A comparison of substance use stigma and health stigma in a population of veterans with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders

OBJECTIVE: This pilot study examined whether substance use or mental illness was more stigmatizing among individuals with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems. METHODS: This study included 48 individuals with co-occurring substance use and mental health problems enrolled in a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services funded treatment program. Subjects received a baseline assessment that included addiction, mental health, and stigma measures. RESULTS: The sample consisted primarily of White males with an average age of 38 years. Substance abuse was found to be more stigmatizing than mental illness, F(1, 47) = 14.213, p < .001, and stigma varied across four different levels of stigma (Aware, Agree, Apply, and Harm), F(2.099, 98.675) = 117.883, p < .001. The interaction between type and level of stigma was also significant, F(2.41, 113.284) = 20.250, p < .001, indicating that differences in reported stigma between types varied across levels of stigma. Post hoc tests found a significant difference between all levels of stigma except for the comparison between Apply and Harm. Reported stigma was significantly higher for substance abuse than mental illness at the Aware and Agree levels. In addition, pairwise comparisons found significant differences between all levels of stigma with the exception of the comparison between Apply and Harm, indicating a pattern whereby reported stigma generally decreased from the first level (Aware stage) to subsequent levels. CONCLUSIONS: These results have important implications for treatment, suggesting the need to incorporate anti-stigma interventions for individuals with co-occurring disorders with a greater focus on substance abuse

Diffusion Tensor Imaging for Assessment of Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Patients With Breast Cancer.

In this study, the prognostic significance of tumor metrics derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) was evaluated in patients with locally advanced breast cancer undergoing neoadjuvant therapy. DTI and contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging were acquired at 1.5 T in 34 patients before treatment and after 3 cycles of taxane-based therapy (early treatment). Tumor fractional anisotropy (FA), principal eigenvalues (λ1, λ2, and λ3), and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) were estimated for tumor regions of interest drawn on DTI data. The association between DTI metrics and final tumor volume change was evaluated with Spearman rank correlation. DTI metrics were investigated as predictors of pathological complete response (pCR) by calculating the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Early changes in tumor FA and ADC significantly correlated with final tumor volume change post therapy (ρ = -0.38, P = .03 and ρ = -0.71, P &lt; .001, respectively). Pretreatment tumor ADC was significantly lower in the pCR than in the non-pCR group (P = .04). At early treatment, patients with pCR had significantly higher percent changes of tumor λ1, λ2, λ3, and ADC than those without pCR. The AUCs for early percent changes in tumor FA and ADC were 0.60 and 0.83, respectively. The early percent changes in tumor eigenvalues and ADC were the strongest DTI-derived predictors of pCR. Although early percent change in tumor FA had a weak association with pCR, the significant correlation with final tumor volume change suggests that this metric changes with therapy and may merit further evaluation

The Crumpling Transition Revisited

The ``crumpling" transition, between rigid and crumpled surfaces, has been object of much discussion over the past years. The common lore is that such transition should be of second order. However, some lattice versions of the rigidity term on fixed connectivity surfaces seem to suggest that the transition is of higher order instead. While some models exhibit what appear to be lattice artifacts, others are really indistiguishable from models where second order transitions have been reported and yet appear to have third order transitions.Comment: Contribution to Lattice 92. 4 pages. espcrc2.sty file included. 6 figures upon request. UB-ECM-92/30 and UAB-FT-29

Music Education and Sustainability in Lombok, Indonesia

This article discusses the challenges of teaching and sustaining music and other performing arts on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. It follows my field research trajectory on the island over a period of 34 years and analyzes the efforts of government interventions, non-government actors, and teachers and educational institutions in the transmission and sustainability of the arts. Interpretations indicate that a combination of globalization, urbanization, social media, everyday mediatization, and Islamization over recent decades negatively impacted traditional musics in specific ways, by problematizing sustainability. However, several agents–individuals inside and outside the government who understood the situation and had the foresight to take appropriate action–developed programs and organizations to maintain or aestheticize the performing arts, sustain musician livelihoods, and engage a new generation of male youth in music and dance. These efforts, supplemented by the formation of groups of leaders dedicated to the study of early culture on Lombok and fresh initiatives in music education, have ushered in new opportunities and visibility for traditional music and performing arts and performing artists

The Phase Diagram of Crystalline Surfaces

We report the status of a high-statistics Monte Carlo simulation of non-self-avoiding crystalline surfaces with extrinsic curvature on lattices of size up to $128^2$ nodes. We impose free boundary conditions. The free energy is a gaussian spring tethering potential together with a normal-normal bending energy. Particular emphasis is given to the behavior of the model in the cold phase where we measure the decay of the normal-normal correlation function.Comment: 9 pages latex (epsf), 4 EPS figures, uuencoded and compressed. Contribution to Lattice '9

M.C.R.G. Study of Fixed-connectivity Surfaces

We apply Monte Carlo Renormalization group to the crumpling transition in random surface models of fixed connectivity. This transition is notoriously difficult to treat numerically. We employ here a Fourier accelerated Langevin algorithm in conjunction with a novel blocking procedure in momentum space which has proven extremely successful in $\lambda\phi^4$. We perform two successive renormalizations in lattices with up to $64^2$ sites. We obtain a result for the critical exponent $\nu$ in general agreement with previous estimates and similar error bars, but with much less computational effort. We also measure with great accuracy $\eta$. As a by-product we are able to determine the fractal dimension $d_H$ of random surfaces at the crumpling transition.Comment: 35 pages,Latex file, 6 Postscript figures uuencoded,uses psfig.sty 2 misspelled references corrected and one added. Paper unchange

Religious Processions in Indonesia: Cultural Identity and Politics on Bali and Lombok

In Bali and Lombok in Indonesia, processions—like similar events in many other parts of the world—are ritualized events breaking the normal flow of time. They are always temporally marked, and can be characterized as either religious and temple- or mosque-sponsored, or secular and state-sponsored. This article discusses religious processions generally on the neighbor islands of Bali and Lombok, and focuses on the processions of the spectacular Lingsar temple festival on Lombok. The festival conjoins the migrant Hindu Balinese and the local Muslim Sasak (the majority ethnic group) in ritual participation, but that participation differs in significant ways that are represented in the processions. For the Balinese, the festival is religious and tied to the original, divinely inspired mission from Bali to Lombok; for the Sasak, the festival is “cultural” and a memorial to a Muslim hero who introduced the religion and sacrificed himself to initiate rice field fertility for Sasak descendants. The festival requires an astounding 12 Sasak processions, seven Balinese processions and two mixed processions (some traverse between sacred points, others circumambulate). The music – primarily performed by gamelan ensembles – transforms the notion of time, calls forth the divine, announces the missions and narratives of the processions, and represents both the contestations between Sasak and Balinese over temple ownership and the eventual transcendence of that tension to interreligious unity. And, it is this unity that is the overarching goal of the festival

Steiner Variations on Random Surfaces

Ambartzumian et.al. suggested that the modified Steiner action functional had desirable properties for a random surface action. However, Durhuus and Jonsson pointed out that such an action led to an ill-defined grand-canonical partition function and suggested that the addition of an area term might improve matters. In this paper we investigate this and other related actions numerically for dynamically triangulated random surfaces and compare the results with the gaussian plus extrinsic curvature actions that have been used previously.Comment: 8 page

The Theory of Dynamical Random Surfaces with Extrinsic Curvature

We analyze numerically the critical properties of a two-dimensional discretized random surface with extrinsic curvature embedded in a three-dimensional space. The use of the toroidal topology enables us to enforce the non-zero external extension without the necessity of defining a boundary and allows us to measure directly the string tension. We show that a phase transition from the crumpled phase to the smooth phase observed earlier for a spherical topology appears also for a toroidal surface for the same finite value of the coupling constant of the extrinsic curvature term. The phase transition is characterized by the vanishing of the string tension. We discuss the possible non-trivial continuum limit of the theory, when approaching the critical point. Numerically we find a value of the critical exponent \n to be between .38 and .42. The specific heat, related to the extrinsic curvature term seems not to diverge (or diverge slower than logarithmically) at the critical point.Comment: figures available as postscript files on request. 28 pages plus figure

Folding transition of the triangular lattice in a discrete three--dimensional space

A vertex model introduced by M. Bowick, P. Di Francesco, O. Golinelli, and E. Guitter (cond-mat/9502063) describing the folding of the triangular lattice onto the face centered cubic lattice has been studied in the hexagon approximation of the cluster variation method. The model describes the behaviour of a polymerized membrane in a discrete three--dimensional space. We have introduced a curvature energy and a symmetry breaking field and studied the phase diagram of the resulting model. By varying the curvature energy parameter, a first-order transition has been found between a flat and a folded phase for any value of the symmetry breaking field.Comment: 11 pages, latex file, 2 postscript figure