This study employed psychoanalytic theory to delve into the ways Sierra Leonean poets Celia Eva Beatrice Thompson, Princess Mildred Kailey, and Kayode Adesimi Robbin-Coker explored themes of despair, ...lust, and loss in their poetry. Addressing a notable gap in literary criticism, especially regarding Sierra Leonean authors, the research sought to raise the international stature of African writers and support students facing challenges with poetry in West African public exams. Employing psychoanalytic principles, the study uncovered deeper meanings behind the unconscious drives and emotions in these poets' works. It involved analyzing the occurrence of themes, detecting psychoanalytically significant lines and phrases, and identifying central themes and literary techniques used to express complex emotions. The analysis, which combined thematic and literary analysis, focused on the language, themes, and use of figurative language, diction, and other poetic devices in Thompson’s 41, Kailey’s 20, and Robbin-Coker’s 23 poems. This approach highlighted their distinct ways of depicting despair, lust, and loss. By integrating thematic analysis, the study offered a more profound comprehension of each poet's style. Ultimately, this psychoanalytic exploration aimed to enhance critical interpretation skills and helped in understanding the deeper psychological aspects of Sierra Leonean and other African poetry.
•Gabra2 knockout (KO) has predictive validity in modeling SSRI-resistant depression.•Desipramine has an anxiolytic and antidepressant-like action in Gabra2 KO mice.•Fluoxetine has an anxiogenic-like ...action in Gabra2 KO mice.•Fluoxetine has a prodepressive-like (despair-based) action in Gabra2 KO mice.
Deficits in neuronal inhibition via gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) type A receptors (GABAA-Rs) are implicated in the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder and the therapeutic effects of current antidepressant treatments, however, the relevant GABAA-R subtype as defined by its alpha subunit is still unknown. We previously reported anxiety- and depressive-like behavior in alpha2+/− and alpha2−/− mice, respectively (Vollenweider, 2011). We sought to determine whether this phenotype could be reversed by chronic antidepressant treatment. Adult male mice received 4 or 8 mg/kg fluoxetine or 53 mg/kg desipramine in their drinking water for four weeks before undergoing behavioral testing. In the novelty suppressed feeding test, desipramine had anxiolytic-like effects reducing the latencies to bite and to eat the pellet in both wild-type and alpha2+/− mice. Surprisingly, 4 mg/kg fluoxetine had anxiogenic-like effects in alpha2+/− mice increasing latency to bite and to eat while 8 mg/kg fluoxetine increased the latency to eat in both wild-type and alpha2+/− mice. In the forced swim and tail suspension tests, chronic desipramine treatment increased latency to immobility in wild-type and alpha2−/− mice. In contrast, chronic fluoxetine treatment increased immobility in alpha2−/− mice in both tasks while generally having no effect in wild-type mice. These findings suggest that in preclinical paradigms of anxiety and behavioral despair the antidepressant-like effects of desipramine are independent of alpha2-containing GABAA-Rs, while a reduction in alpha2 expression leads to an increased sensitivity to anxiogenic- and prodepressant-like effects with chronic fluoxetine treatment, pointing to a potential role of alpha2-containing GABAA-Rs in the response to serotonin-selective antidepressants.
Deaths of despair, morbidity, and emotional distress continue to rise in the United States, largely borne by those without a college degree-the majority of American adults-for many of whom the ...economy and society are no longer delivering. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the United States is diverging by education in a way not seen in other rich countries. We review the rising prevalence of pain, despair, and suicide among those without a bachelor's degree. Pain and despair created a baseline demand for opioids, but the escalation of addiction came from pharma and its political enablers. We examine the politics of despair, or how less-educated people have abandoned and been abandoned by the Democratic Party. Whereas healthier states once voted Republican in presidential elections, now the less-healthy states do. We review deaths during COVID-19, finding that mortality in 2020 maintained or exacerbated existing relative mortality differences between those with and without college degrees.
Hope takes on particular significance at this historical moment, which is defined by the prospect of a climate-altered future. Young people (aged 18–29) from climate action groups in New Zealand were ...interviewed about how they perceived the future. Deploying a unique combination of conceptual tools and in-depth analysis of a small set of interviews, I explore young New Zealanders’ complex relationships with despair and hope. Paulo Freire claimed his despair as a young man ‘educated’ what emerged as hope. I extend Freire’s concept in two ways by considering: (a) how hope might also ‘educate’ despair and (b) how hope and despair might operate at a collective level, drawing on Rosemary Randall’s psychotherapeutic analysis of societal responses to climate change. Participants identified collective processes as generating hope. Collectivizing hope and despair is important so that young people do not feel climate change is only their burden to solve.
Abstract
Purpose
Accepting and adapting to the child’s diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be challenging for parents. We aimed to assess domains of parental adjustment namely despair, ...self-blame, and acceptance among parents whose children were diagnosed with ASD.
Methods
A cross-sectional study was conducted among 111 parents of children with autism who attended Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit (CAPU), in a university teaching hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Sociodemographic profiles of both parents and children were gathered. Parental adjustment focusing on parental self-blame, despair and acceptance were assessed using self-reported questionnaires namely Adjustment to the Diagnosis of Autism (ADA).
Results
Higher level of despair was associated with parents who have medical illness (β = 0.214, p = 0.016) and children who received antipsychotic medications (β = 0.329, p < 0.001). Parents with tertiary education (β = -0.207, p = 0.023) and those with autistic child attended school (β = -0.200, p = 0.037) have lower level of despair. Parents with medical illness (β = 0.245, p = 0.008), child receiving antipsychotic medications (β = 0.251, p = 0.005), Chinese ethnicity (β = 0.185, p = 0.04), and child’s gender (β = 0.283, p = 0.003) were significantly associated with higher level of self-blame. Lower acceptance was found among Chinese parents (β = -0.264, p = 0.005) while married parents had higher acceptance levels (β = 0.215, p = 0.022).
Conclusion
Parental adjustment involving domains of despair, self-blame, and acceptance were significantly associated with ethnicity of parents, educational level, parents’ marital status and medical illness, as well as the ASD children’s schooling status and type of medications used.
DSM-5 lists 9 different symptoms for major depressive disorder and dictates that either “depressed mood” or “loss of interest or pleasure” should be present for diagnosis. Both are relatively ...high-level symptoms of the complex affecto-cognitive disease. However, the single most common behavioral paradigm and the gold standard animal (rodent) test for depression, the forced swim test (FST), measures a low-level mechanical feature that resembles “psychomotor retardation” observed in depression. This symptom refers to the slowing down of cognitive processes and an associated reduction in mobility. Likewise, the FST involves placing a rodent (mouse or rat) in a water-filled cylinder to measure its escape-related mobility over periods of immobility. Avoiding the term depression, this particular form of immobility observed in the FST was termed behavioral despair. Behavioral despair does not correlate with general mobility levels of the animal as measured in an open field test; and FST can reliably differentiate antidepressant treatments from other treatments that merely lead to increased mobility. It is therefore not a mere reflection of decreased physical energy or locomotion, but indicates the level of psychomotor activity of the animal. This review discusses the clinical significance and neurobiology of psychomotor retardation, and evaluates how FST, measuring this mechanical aspect of the disease, emerges as a reliable method and a critical step in antidepressant research.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could effectively relieve the pain and depression in neuropathic pain (NP) patients. However, the specific treatment parameters and exact mechanism ...are still unclear. Our purpose is to observe the effects of rTMS on pain and despair‐like behaviour in chronic constriction injury (CCI) rats and explore its possible mechanism. Thirty‐two 8‐week‐old male Sprague–Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups: sham operation group (S, n = 8), CCI group (n = 8), 1 Hz‐rTMS group (n = 8) and 10 Hz‐rTMS group (n = 8). The rTMS was applied to the left dorsal anterior agranular insular (AId) 1 week after the operation, once a day, 5 days/week for 4 consecutive weeks. Mechanical hyperalgesia, despair‐like behaviours and sciatic nerve function were used to evaluate the effects of rTMS. Besides, glucose metabolism, the metabotropic glutamate receptors 5 (mGluR5), N‐Methyl‐D‐Aspartic acid receptor type 2B (NMDAR2B), tumour necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α), interleukin‐6 (Ll‐6) and interleukin‐1β (Ll‐1β) in AId were tested to explore the possible mechanism. Compared with 1 Hz‐rTMS, the rats of 10 Hz‐rTMS had higher the mechanical hyperalgesia, higher sugar preference and shorter swimming immobility time. Besides, the expressions of mGluR5, NMDAR2B, TNF‐α, Ll‐1β and Ll‐6 both in 1 Hz‐rTMS and 10 Hz‐rTMS groups were reduced compared with the CCI group; the 10 Hz‐rTMS group had a more decrease than that of 1 Hz‐rTMS. Furthermore, the 18F‐FDG uptake was lower than that in the 1 Hz‐rTMS group. Compared with 1 Hz‐rTMS, 10 Hz‐rTMS could more effectively relieve mechanical hyperalgesia and reverse despair‐like behaviour in rats. The mechanism could be related to regulating mGluR5/NMDAR2B‐related inflammatory signalling pathways in the AId.
Chronic compression injury to the right sciatic nerve in rats produces NP and significantly increases the expression levels of mGluR5 and NMDAR2B in the left AId area. After rTMS treatment in the left AId area, the expression levels of mGluR5 and NMDAR2B were significantly decreased, and NP was also significantly reduced. The present study speculates that mGluR5/NMDAR2B may be an effective target of rTMS for the treatment of NP.
Objective
To assess the relationship between county‐level eviction rates and drug and alcohol mortality rates.
Data Sources
Eviction rates from 2003 to 2016 provided by the Princeton University ...Eviction Lab were merged with Multiple Cause‐of‐Death Mortality Files and aggregated to the county‐year level.
Study Design
All opioid (prescription and heroin), cocaine, psychostimulant, benzodiazepine, antidepressant, and alcohol poisoning–related deaths per 100 000 people, eviction rates, and socioeconomic indicators were merged at the county‐year level from 2003 to 2016. We estimated a series of mortality rate models with county and year fixed effects and used a control function (2SRI) method to adjust for the endogeneity of eviction rates.
Data Collection/Extraction Methods
We matched retrospectively collected datasets.
Principal Findings
Higher levels of eviction rates were consistently associated with higher rates of mortality across six of nine substance categories studied when all counties were combined. Subanalysis by USDA population density measures indicated this positive association was almost entirely driven by urban counties; few systematic associations between the eviction rate levels and mortality were observed for suburban or rural counties.
Conclusions
Risk of eviction appears to exacerbate the current “deaths of despair” crisis associated with substance use. Proposed changes to Housing and Urban Development policy that are expected to substantially increase the risk of eviction may worsen an already‐acute mortality crisis.
Purpose of Review
This contribution reviews the newest empirical evidence regarding the burden of mental and addictive disorders and weighs their importance for global health in the first decades of ...the twenty-first century.
Recent Findings
Mental and addictive disorders affected more than 1 billion people globally in 2016. They caused 7% of all global burden of disease as measured in DALYs and 19% of all years lived with disability. Depression was associated with most DALYs for both sexes, with higher rates in women as all other internalizing disorders, whereas other disorders such as substance use disorders had higher rates in men.
Summary
Mental and addictive disorders affect a significant portion of the global population with high burden, in particular in high- and upper-middle-income countries. The relative share of these disorders has increased in the past decades, in part due to stigma and lack of treatment. Future research needs to better analyze the role of mental and addictive disorders in shifts of life expectancy.
The label “deaths of despair” for rising US mortality related to drugs/alcohol/suicide seems to implicate emotional distress as the cause. However, a Durkheimian approach would argue that underlying ...structural factors shape individuals’ behavior and emotions. Despite a growing literature on deaths of despair, no study has directly compared the effects of distress and structural factors on deaths of despair versus other causes of mortality. Using data from the Midlife in the United States study with approximately 26 years of mortality follow-up, we evaluated whether psychological or economic distress, employment status, and social integration were more strongly associated with drug/alcohol/suicide mortality than with other causes. Cox hazard models, adjusted for potential confounders, showed little evidence that psychological or economic distress were more strongly associated with mortality related to drugs/alcohol/suicide than mortality from other causes. While distress measures were modestly, but significantly associated with these deaths, the associations were similar in magnitude for many other types of mortality. In contrast, detachment from the labor force and lower social integration were both strongly associated with drug/alcohol/suicide mortality, more than for many other types of mortality. Differences in the estimated percentage dying of despair between age 25 and 65 were larger for employment status (2.0% for individuals who were neither employed nor retired versus only 0.6% for currently employed) and for social integration (1.9% for low versus 0.7% for high integration) than for negative affect (1.2% for high versus 0.8% for no negative affect). Most of the association between distress and drug/alcohol/suicide mortality appeared to result from confounding with structural factors and with pre-existing health conditions that may influence both the perception of distress and mortality risk. While deaths of despair result from self-destructive behavior, our results suggest that structural factors may be more important determinants than subjective distress.
•Psychological and economic distress were modestly linked with deaths of despair.•Those measures had associations of similar magnitude with other types of mortality.•Employment and social integration were strongly associated with deaths of despair.•In the US, those associations were stronger than for many other types of mortality.•Structural factors may be more important determinants than subjective distress.
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