Everyday Life, Culture, and Recovery: Carer Experiences in Care Homes for Individuals with Severe Mental Illness

Supported homes or Care Homes (CHs) have become in-services that play a fundamental role in social-health systems, particularly in mental health systems in Europe and the United States. They provide settings where residents' day-to-day routines are supervised by in-house non-clinician professional carers. Ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted by expert professional carers of persons with schizophrenia to explore interactions and activities between carers and users living in special "Care Homes". Analysis focused primarily on the functions of everyday life and daily routines in the recovery process. Social positioning analysis was used to investigate meanings and subjective experiences of professionals. The analysis revealed the importance of personal interactions in daily routines for recovery. We identified two main concerns guiding professionals' interactions with users: "Bring [users] to the here and now" and "give them the initiative to start actions". We suggest that CHs promote the construction of privileged identity in western urban societies, forming part of the process towards recovery and better social integration.     

Exoticism as a Mediator of Everyday Experiences of Nature: an Anthropological Exploration of Soundscape in Zoos

The increasing levels of stress entailed by contemporary urban lifestyles can lead to a greater desire to escape from cities. The restorative sense of ‘being away’ produced by natural environments has been substantially explored in greenspaces but little studied in zoos, which endeavour to immerse visitors in a local or exotic environment through both the visual environment and soundscape. We explore how soundscapes contribute to this sense of immersion through self-reflective interviews with 20 participants in two zoos in Paris (France). The zoo was perceived as a natural or a socially crowded area depending on the auditory context. Interestingly, focusing on the captive exotic animals seemed to make participants more aware of the more common birds around them in the zoo. By highlighting both, zoos could potentially increase awareness and care for urban biodiversity.     

Fraternity and Terror: The Organization of Violence in Everyday Life

This paper was inspired by participant observation in the Coalfields towns of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. It is an attempt to demonstrate the significance of violence in the political practice of coal-miners. This significance has been overlooked in the recent enthusiasm for studies of ‘dominant ideologies’. Beyond this, the paper is an attempt to theorize the role of routine violence in the formation, maintenance and dissolution of social groups. The processes of group formation are an important subject for any theory of political practice.     

Interaction of Respiration, Ion Regulation, and Acid-Base Balance in the Everyday Life of Aquatic Crustaceans

Extracellular and intracellular acid-base balance is necessaryfor the maintenance of normal metabolic processes. The primarysource of acid is metabolically produced CO₂, and the CO₂/HCO₃^–system is the most significant buffer. The regulation of acid-basebalance is complex, involving the interaction between respiratorygas exchange and ion transport. In aquatic crustaceans respirationis governed by the need to extract oxygen from water, an O₂-poormedium; thus, acid-base balance is maintained primarily throughion transport mechanisms. These mechanisms include Na⁺/H⁺ andCl^–/HCO₃^– exchange processes that are sensitiveto the extracellular acid-base status of the animal. In marinecrabs, ion regulation and acid-base balance are accomplishedby the posterior gills, while in freshwater species all gillsand the antennal gland perform these functions. Intracellularacid-base balance appears to be maintained primarily by iontransport across the cell membrane. Hemolymph pH varies inverselywith acclimation temperature and salinity. In both cases Pco₂remains nearly constant, and the pH change is a result of changesin hemolymph HCO₃^– concentrations brought about by ionexchange mechanisms. Environmental hypercapnia or hyperoxiainduces a repiratory acidosis characterized by increased Pco₂,low pH, and elevated HCO₃^–; this is partially compensatedfor by ion exchange processes that bring about a further increasein hemolymph HCO₃^–. Exercise causes a mixed respiratoryand metabolic acidosis with compensation via H⁺ ion excretionand hyperventilation.     

The Clinic and Elsewhere: Illness,Sexuality, and Social Experience Among Young African American Men in Baltimore,Maryland

This paper is concerned with how disclosure becomes self-production for young adults within the setting of the sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic. The STD clinic is a special medical environment where the process of disclosure is not just a way of accessing treatment; it is also a process through which illness, sexuality, and social experience become entangled in telling. Illness according to medical categories is reshaped in the social world, bringing a different set of criteria to bear on the definition of illness. The concern we raise regards how meaning is secured simultaneously through the experience of illness and social relations. Using data from a series of clinic-based ethnographic interviews, we examine the narratives of three young men. Together, the narratives demonstrate the interrelatedness of illness and self-production in various forms. In one case the tension between interpersonal violence and self-preservation is central. In another, the place of knowledge in family relationships renders the entire picture of the social unstable. The paper signals a number of issues absent in clinical and epidemiological depictions of vulnerability, particularly in the context of the urban United States.     

The Fly Agaric,Soma ,Father Christmas and the Vikings

1　ThemushroomTheFlyAgaric (Amanitamuscaria (L :Fr.)Hooker)belongstothegenusAmanitaPers .,agroupwhichhasplayedmajorrolesinhumanaffairsthrough outhistory .Itincludesboththemostlydeadlypoi sonousspeciesandpossiblythemostdeliciousspeciesofalloftheediblewildmushrooms.TheFlyAgaricrepresentsthebestknownofallthewildmushroomsandhadthegreatesteffectuponmankindandworldhistory .Itistobeseeninmanychildren′sbooksasthelarge ,brightredmushroomwiththewhitespots,invariablyassociatedwithfairiesandelves.It…     

Power Laws from Linear Neuronal Cable Theory: Power Spectral Densities of the Soma Potential,Soma Membrane Current and Single-Neuron Contribution to the EEG

Power laws, that is, power spectral densities (PSDs) exhibiting behavior for large frequencies f, have been observed both in microscopic (neural membrane potentials and currents) and macroscopic (electroencephalography; EEG) recordings. While complex network behavior has been suggested to be at the root of this phenomenon, we here demonstrate a possible origin of such power laws in the biophysical properties of single neurons described by the standard cable equation. Taking advantage of the analytical tractability of the so called ball and stick neuron model, we derive general expressions for the PSD transfer functions for a set of measures of neuronal activity: the soma membrane current, the current-dipole moment (corresponding to the single-neuron EEG contribution), and the soma membrane potential. These PSD transfer functions relate the PSDs of the respective measurements to the PSDs of the noisy input currents. With homogeneously distributed input currents across the neuronal membrane we find that all PSD transfer functions express asymptotic high-frequency power laws with power-law exponents analytically identified as for the soma membrane current, for the current-dipole moment, and for the soma membrane potential. Comparison with available data suggests that the apparent power laws observed in the high-frequency end of the PSD spectra may stem from uncorrelated current sources which are homogeneously distributed across the neural membranes and themselves exhibit pink () noise distributions. While the PSD noise spectra at low frequencies may be dominated by synaptic noise, our findings suggest that the high-frequency power laws may originate in noise from intrinsic ion channels. The significance of this finding goes beyond neuroscience as it demonstrates how power laws with a wide range of values for the power-law exponent α may arise from a simple, linear partial differential equation.     

Self and Illness: Changing Relationships in Response to Life in the Community Following Prolonged Institutionalisation

Increasingly since the 1950s mentally ill people in the Western world have been removed from institutional care. In this paper I am concerned primarily with the response of psychiatric patients to living in a ‘normal’ community environment, in particular the extent to which they are able to assume new social roles and identities after long periods of institutional care. I conclude that despite persistent mental illness, deinstitutionalised patients have developed new roles and new identities, a new sense of independence, new coping abilities and a capacity to articulate future goals and desires. The findings are drawn from two and a half years fieldwork in an Australian capital city, where a group of long‐stay psychiatric in‐patients, who would not normally be considered for discharge, were given the opportunity to live in mainstream society. This accompanied the reduction of in‐patient beds and the eventual closure of a large psychiatric hospital as it amalgamated with another hospital nearby.     

Cultural Differences in the Experience of Everyday Symptoms: A Comparative Study of South Asian and European American Women

This paper describes a study of medically ambiguous symptoms in two contrasting cultural groups. The study combined a qualitative, meaning-centered approach with a structured coding system and comparative design. Thirty-six South Asian immigrants and thirty-seven European Americans participated in a semistructured health history interview designed to elicit conceptual models of medically unexplained illness. The groups reported similar symptoms, but the organization of illness episodes and explanatory models associated with these episodes differed sharply. A variety of cultural variables and processes is proposed to account for observed differences, including somatization, the role of local illness categories, and the divergent core conflicts and values associated with gender roles. It is argued that the comparative design of the study provided insights that could not have been achieved through the study of a single group.     

Secrecy, Ambiguity, and the Everyday in Kabre Culture

Secrecy, the intentional concealing of information, is very much a part of everyday life and discourse among the Kabre of northern Togo (West Africa). This article proposes an interpretation of Kabre everyday secrecy that relies on indigenous understandings and attempts to move beyond the functionalist assumptions of many previous analyses of secrecy in Africa. It also raises more general questions about theories of culture that ignore the everyday and that fail to come to terms with the negotiated meanings and the indirect types of communication that constitute everyday social relations.     

Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol, and Status in Spain

Carnival and Culture: Sex, Symbol, and Status in Spain. David D. Gilmore. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 244 pp.