Purpose of Review
The present review synthesizes recent literature on social determinants and mental health outcomes and provides recommendations for how to advance the field. We summarize current ...studies related to changes in the conceptualization of social determinants, how social determinants impact mental health, what we have learned from social determinant interventions, and new methods to collect, use, and analyze social determinant data.
Recent Findings
Recent research has increasingly focused on interactions between multiple social determinants, interventions to address upstream causes of mental health challenges, and use of simulation models to represent complex systems. However, methodological challenges and inconsistent findings prevent a definitive understanding of which social determinants should be addressed to improve mental health, and within what populations these interventions may be most effective.
Summary
Recent advances in strategies to collect, evaluate, and analyze social determinants suggest the potential to better appraise their impact and to implement relevant interventions.
The Right to the Smart City Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin / Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin
2019, 2019-06-07
eBook
Cities around the world are pursuing a smart cities agenda. In general, these initiatives are promoted and rolled-out by governments and corporations which enact various forms of top-down, ...technocratic governance and reproduce neoliberal governmentality. Despite calls for the smart city agenda to be more citizen-centric and bottom-up in nature, how this translates into policy and initiatives is still weakly articulated and practiced. Indeed, there is little meaningful engagement by key stakeholders with respect to rights, citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, co-creation, and how the smart city might be productively reimagined and remade. This book fills this lacuna by providing critical reflection on whether another smart city is possible and what such a city might look like, exploring themes such as how citizens are framed within it, the ethical implications of smart city systems, and whether injustices are embedded in city systems, infrastructures, services and their calculative practices. Contributors question whether the need for order, and the priorities of capital and property rights, trump individual and collective liberty. Ultimately considering what kind of smart city do individuals want to create, and how we create the most sustainable smart urban landscape.
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.
To evaluate whether exposure to the United States' discriminatory housing practice of redlining, which occurred in over two-hundred cities in the 1930s, is associated with modern-day, community-level ...incidence of firearm injury.
Firearm violence is a public health epidemic within the United States. Federal policies are crucial in both shaping and reducing the risk of firearm violence; identifying policies that might have contributed to risks also offers potential solutions. We analyzed whether 1930s exposure to the discriminatory housing practices that occurred in over two-hundred U.S. cities was associated with modern-day, community-level incidence of firearm injury.
We performed a nationwide retrospective cohort study between 2014-2018. Urban Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) historically exposed to detrimental redlining (grades C and D) were matched to unexposed ZCTAs based on modern-day population-level demographic characteristics (i.e., age, Gini index, median income, percentage Black population, education level). Incidence of firearm injury was derived from the Gun Violence Archive and aggregated to ZCTA level counts. Our primary outcome was the incidence of firearm injury, modeled using zero inflated negative binomial regression.
When controlling for urban firearm risk factors, neighborhoods with detrimental redlining were associated with 2.6 additional firearm incidents annually, compared to non-redlined areas with similar modern-day risk factors. Over our study period, this accounts for an additional 23,000 firearm injuries.
Historic, discriminatory Federal policy continue to impact modern-day firearm violence. Policies aimed at reversing detrimental redlining may offer an economic means to reduce firearm violence.
O Ciclo das Políticas é uma abordagem sistemática de superação de problemas públicos, simplificada em um ciclo de tarefas, indo desde à identificação dos problemas, até à avaliação dos resultados de ...políticas públicas. Este artigo buscou compreender como a literatura mais recente aborda o papel dos indicadores sociais nas políticas públicas por meio de uma Revisão Sistemática (RS) da produção científica dos últimos 05 anos, na base de dados Springer. Foram analisados 64 artigos da área de ciências sociais. Os principais resultados evidenciaram: a) A escacez de trabalhos a respeito do tema em língua portuguesa; b) Há estudos tratando do uso de indicadores em todas as etapas do ciclo de políticas públicas; c) Há convergência em parte dos usos indicados pela literatura anterior e os indicados pelos estudos desta revisão; d) A descrição das aplicações de indicadores sociais no ciclo de políticas públicas é lateral em grande parte dos trabalhos. Dentre os limites para este trabalho, destacam-se a pouca quantidade de estudos sobre o tema em língua portuguesa e a falta de clareza e profundidade na definição das funções dos indicadores sociais estudados dentro do ciclo de políticas públicas. Como sugestão para futuras pesquisas, temos a expansão deste mesmo estudo, especialmente com foco da importância dos indicadores sociais na implementação de políticas e programas, etapa pouco abordada nos estudos aqui revisados.
Early care and education for many children in the U.S. is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a critical time for child development, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early ...in children's lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Yet, compared to other advanced economies, high-quality child care and preschool in the U.S. are scarce and prohibitively expensive for many middle class and most disadvantaged families. To what extent can early-life interventions provide these children with the opportunities that their affluent peers enjoy and contribute to reduced social inequality in the long term? "Cradle to Kindergarten" offers a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children. The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private child care, which means that children from low-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them. Existing policies, such as pre-kindergarten in some states, are only partial solutions. To address these deficiencies, the authors propose to overhaul the early care system, beginning with a federal paid parental leave policy that provides both mothers and fathers with time and financial support after the birth of a child. They also advocate increased public benefits, including an expansion of the child care tax credit, and a new child care assurance program that subsidizes the cost of early care for low- and moderate-income families. They also propose that universal, high-quality early education in the states should start by age three, and a reform of the Head Start program that would include more intensive services for families living in areas of concentrated poverty and experiencing multiple adversities from the earliest point in these most disadvantaged children's lives. They conclude with an implementation plan and contend that these reforms are attainable within a ten-year timeline. Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn, fully develop their capacities, and have a fair shot at success. "Cradle to Kindergarten" presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development.
After decades of the American "war on drugs" and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce ...the prison population: addiction treatment.InAddicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system-two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim's book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.
Implementation occurs as a ‘late’ part in the stages model of the policy process. As such, it is seen as following upon and subordinate to the preceding stages of agenda-setting and policy formation. ...Hence, implementation is often addressed as ‘the rest’. This view on implementation as a presupposed residual in goal achievement implies little attention to ‘political’ dimensions, like ambiguity and conflict. Therefore, the view can only partially explain the – sometimes disappointing – results of policy processes. Alternatively, approaches to the policy/implementation nexus with an explicit focus on what happens at the street level have a greater explanatory potential. They are not taking implementation for granted as a seemingly technical matter, simply prescribed by policy objectives.
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