Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Jan 2016
ReviewFraming health for land-use planning legislation: A qualitative descriptive content analysis.
Framing health as a relevant policy issue for other sectors is not well understood. A recent review of the New South Wales (Australia) land-use planning system resulted in the drafting of legislation with an internationally unprecedented focus on human health. We apply a political science approach to investigate the question 'how and to what extent were health and wider issues framed in submissions to the review?' ⋯ Framing health as a relevant policy issue has the potential to influence legislative change governing the business of other sectors. Without submissions from health agencies arguing the importance of having health as an objective in the proposed legislation it is unlikely health considerations would have gained prominence in the draft bill. The findings have implications for health agency engagement with legislative change processes and beyond in land use planning.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2015
Communal bereavement and resilience in the aftermath of a terrorist event: Evidence from a natural experiment.
Sociological analyses of the psychological distress experienced by persons indirectly exposed to traumatic stressors have been conceptualized as a form of communal bereavement, defined by Catalano and Hartig (2001) as the experience of distress among persons not attached to the deceased. Their theory predicts communal bereavement responses particularly in the setting of loss of essential state, religious, or economic institutions. ⋯ Contrary to findings from the medical and public health literature, we conclude that the September 11 attacks did not have lasting effects on communal bereavement.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2015
Review"Thinking too much": A systematic review of a common idiom of distress.
Idioms of distress communicate suffering via reference to shared ethnopsychologies, and better understanding of idioms of distress can contribute to effective clinical and public health communication. This systematic review is a qualitative synthesis of "thinking too much" idioms globally, to determine their applicability and variability across cultures. We searched eight databases and retained publications if they included empirical quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research regarding a "thinking too much" idiom and were in English. ⋯ However, "thinking too much" idioms reflect aspects of experience, distress, and social positioning not captured by psychiatric diagnoses and often show wide within-cultural variation, in addition to between-cultural differences. Taken together, these findings suggest that "thinking too much" should not be interpreted as a gloss for psychiatric disorder nor assumed to be a unitary symptom or syndrome within a culture. We suggest five key ways in which engagement with "thinking too much" idioms can improve global mental health research and interventions: it (1) incorporates a key idiom of distress into measurement and screening to improve validity of efforts at identifying those in need of services and tracking treatment outcomes; (2) facilitates exploration of ethnopsychology in order to bolster cultural appropriateness of interventions; (3) strengthens public health communication to encourage engagement in treatment; (4) reduces stigma by enhancing understanding, promoting treatment-seeking, and avoiding unintentionally contributing to stigmatization; and (5) identifies a key locally salient treatment target.
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Social science & medicine · Dec 2015
ReviewTransgender stigma and health: A critical review of stigma determinants, mechanisms, and interventions.
Transgender people in the United States experience widespread prejudice, discrimination, violence, and other forms of stigma. ⋯ Additional research is needed to document the causal relationship between stigma and adverse health as well as the mediators and moderators of stigma in US transgender populations. Multi-level interventions to prevent stigma towards transgender people are warranted.