Understanding Hard to Reach Adolescents: A Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Aetiology, Presentation and Intervention

This thesis examines hard to reach adolescents in respect of; the link between historical, contextual and familial factors, the young people’s inner working model and the manner of intervention with such young people and how one might understand what is most helpful. Psycho-social case work with seven Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) adolescent boys in an area of high social deprivation and ethnographic study of the direct and wider environment was undertaken. This environment of trauma organised systems, within a community dominated by gang violence was impactful on the whole project. The data was analysed by means of a case study approach using psychodynamic, attachment and neurodevelopmental paradigms. The findings suggest that early and ongoing adverse relational and attachment experiences impacts on four aspects of ‘hard to reachness’: Biological, Unconscious, Relational and Environmental. This includes neurochemical disregulation, excessive use of projective processes, emotional immaturity, difficulties with reciprocity and taking responsibility. The four aspects of ‘hard to reachness’ correspond to four domains of intervention: Management and Safety, Therapeutic, Relationship and Social/External. The relationship is seen as central to successful intervention and the worker needs to be able to move between domains as required. Three groupings of presentations were identified; Chameleons, Reactors and Fragmentors based on neurodevelopmental arousal states, types of projective process and attachment styles. Reactors were seen to be typical of the hard to reach group. It is argued that the Reactors continue to rely on very early teleological or concrete behavioural defences which are interactive rather than interpsychic. Thus their behaviour is seen as immature, annoying and deliberate rather than archaic defences against anxiety where neither workers nor young people understand the powerful unconscious forces underlying their acting out

Understanding hard to reach adolescents: A bio-psycho-social model of aetiology, presentation and intervention

This thesis examines hard to reach adolescents in respect of; the link between historical, contextual and familial factors, the young people’s inner working model and the manner of intervention with such young people and how one might understand what is most helpful. Psycho-social case work with seven Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) adolescent boys in an area of high social deprivation and ethnographic study of the direct and wider environment was undertaken. This environment of trauma organised systems, within a community dominated by gang violence was impactful on the whole project. The data was analysed by means of a case study approach using psychodynamic, attachment and neurodevelopmental paradigms. The findings suggest that early and ongoing adverse relational and attachment experiences impacts on four aspects of ‘hard to reachness’: Biological, Unconscious, Relational and Environmental. This includes neurochemical disregulation, excessive use of projective processes, emotional immaturity, difficulties with reciprocity and taking responsibility. The four aspects of ‘hard to reachness’ correspond to four domains of intervention: Management and Safety, Therapeutic, Relationship and Social/External. The relationship is seen as central to successful intervention and the worker needs to be able to move between domains as required. Three groupings of presentations were identified; Chameleons, Reactors and Fragmentors based on neurodevelopmental arousal states, types of projective process and attachment styles. Reactors were seen to be typical of the hard to reach group. It is argued that the Reactors continue to rely on very early teleological or concrete behavioural defences which are interactive rather than interpsychic. Thus their behaviour is seen as immature, annoying and deliberate rather than archaic defences against anxiety where neither workers nor young people understand the powerful unconscious forces underlying their acting out

‘Keeping the Children Close’: Towards an Understanding of Therapeutic Provision at the Mulberry Bush School

UEL Qualitative Research Repor

“A Bit Like You’re Going to therapy”: Reflective Practice Provision at the Mulberry Bush School

This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study of staff participating in the reflective practices and processes available at an English children’s home and specialist school. Researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews, 2 focus groups and 16 journal-based training assignments. Key themes identified in the data are outlined and a composite vignette conveys the lived experience of participating in the organization’s reflective practice provision. Staff highlight the personal intensity of their ongoing reflective work, which is “like therapy but not therapy,” and the challenges and benefits of learning to use and contribute to a reflective milieu. The concluding discussion widens findings by Heine Steinkopf and colleagues concerning the need for a regulating working environment and trustworthy theoretical model and suggests that “epistemic trust” in an organizational culture is key to effective teamwork and personal growth in role

Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs

This article applies an eco-critical approach to contemporary American fiction about the Canada-US border, examining Jim Lynch’s portrayal of the British Columbia-Washington borderlands in his 2009 novel Border Songs. It argues that studying transnational environmental actors in border texts—in this case, marijuana, human migrants, and migratory birds—helps illuminate the contingency of political boundaries, problems of scale, and discourses of risk and security in cross-border regions after 9/11. Further, it suggests that widening the analysis of trans-border activity to include environmental phenomena productively troubles concepts of nature and regional belonging in an era of climate change and economic globalization. Cet article propose une lecture écocritique de la fiction étatsunienne contemporaine portant sur la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis, en étudiant le portrait donné par Jim Lynch de la région frontalière entre la Colombie-Britannique et Washington dans son roman Border Songs, paru en 2009. L’article soutient que l’étude, dans les textes sur la frontière, des acteurs environnementaux transnationaux – dans ce cas-ci, la marijuana, les migrants humains et les oiseaux migratoires – jette un jour nouveau sur la contingence des limites territoriales politiques, des problèmes d’échelle et des discours sur le risque et la sécurité des régions transfrontalières après les évènements du 11 septembre 2001. Il suggère également qu’en élargissant l’analyse de l’activité transfrontalière pour y inclure les phénomènes environnementaux, on brouille de façon productive les concepts de nature et d’appartenance régionale d’une époque marquée par les changements climatiques et la mondialisation de l’économie

Genetic diversity fuels gene discovery for tobacco and alcohol use

Tobacco and alcohol use are heritable behaviours associated with 15% and 5.3% of worldwide deaths, respectively, due largely to broad increased risk for disease and injury(1-4). These substances are used across the globe, yet genome-wide association studies have focused largely on individuals of European ancestries(5). Here we leveraged global genetic diversity across 3.4 million individuals from four major clines of global ancestry (approximately 21% non-European) to power the discovery and fine-mapping of genomic loci associated with tobacco and alcohol use, to inform function of these loci via ancestry-aware transcriptome-wide association studies, and to evaluate the genetic architecture and predictive power of polygenic risk within and across populations. We found that increases in sample size and genetic diversity improved locus identification and fine-mapping resolution, and that a large majority of the 3,823 associated variants (from 2,143 loci) showed consistent effect sizes across ancestry dimensions. However, polygenic risk scores developed in one ancestry performed poorly in others, highlighting the continued need to increase sample sizes of diverse ancestries to realize any potential benefit of polygenic prediction.Peer reviewe

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Measurement of the ratios of branching fractions R(D∗)\mathcal{R}(D^{*}) and R(D0)\mathcal{R}(D^{0})

The ratios of branching fractions $\mathcal{R}(D^{*})\equiv\mathcal{B}(\bar{B}\to D^{*}\tau^{-}\bar{\nu}_{\tau})/\mathcal{B}(\bar{B}\to D^{*}\mu^{-}\bar{\nu}_{\mu})$ and $\mathcal{R}(D^{0})\equiv\mathcal{B}(B^{-}\to D^{0}\tau^{-}\bar{\nu}_{\tau})/\mathcal{B}(B^{-}\to D^{0}\mu^{-}\bar{\nu}_{\mu})$ are measured, assuming isospin symmetry, using a sample of proton-proton collision data corresponding to 3.0 fb${ }^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity recorded by the LHCb experiment during 2011 and 2012. The tau lepton is identified in the decay mode $\tau^{-}\to\mu^{-}\nu_{\tau}\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$. The measured values are $\mathcal{R}(D^{*})=0.281\pm0.018\pm0.024$ and $\mathcal{R}(D^{0})=0.441\pm0.060\pm0.066$, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. The correlation between these measurements is $\rho=-0.43$. Results are consistent with the current average of these quantities and are at a combined 1.9 standard deviations from the predictions based on lepton flavor universality in the Standard Model.Comment: All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-039.html (LHCb public pages