Until recently, the research was reserved for experts rather than for those that have lived personal experience (mental health difficulties, handicap, ethnic minorities etc.). Only academics were ...entitled to be familiar with methodology and research methods. The article is based on literature and research overview in the field of inclusion of experts with personal experience with mental health difficulties into research in the role of researchers. It shows that inclusion of experts by experience into research raised an important question of knowledge construction in social work practice, which has been for a long time »owned« by those with more power. The voice of important others (professionals, relatives) was, in contrast with the voice of service users, deemed as valid and credible, and only important others were recognised as those knowing the truth about users' experience. That was pointed out by many foreign and Slovene national studies, emphasising the importance of knowledge and experience of users. By including experts by experience into research in the role of researchers, the social work practice stops being a mere obligation fulfilment and starts encompassing a wider social frame, taking account of structural and social mechanisms of inclusion. Without that, social work practice would still be based on imaginary presumtions that are far away from reality of users. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Affective disorders present a widespread public health problem as they are among the most frequently diagnosed psychiatric disorders. Clinical practice in the therapy of affective disorders, ...including depressive and bipolar disorders, has showed that pharmacological treatment as a stand-alone therapy proved as less efficient in the long term, compared to those treatments involving any form of adjunctive psychosocial interventions. Functional remediation has been convincingly shown as effective in schizophrenia treatment, and thus it has been considered as increasingly relevant to treatment of depressive and bipolar affective disorders. Functional remediation in persons with affective disorders comprises apart from maintenance treatment also psychoeducational intervention and cognitive remediation, i.e. cognitive skills training. Its aim is to restore the ability to carry out everyday activities in individuals, to help them reintegrate into society as well as to improve occupational outcome and to prevent affective recurrences. The programme of functional remediation is implemented by an interdisciplinary team of professionals from different occupations: psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and nurses. The article summarises research outcomes, theoretical underpinnings of functional remediation of persons with depressive and bipolar affective disorders and some current implementation aspects. Adapted from the source document.
Alongside the movement of patients' participation within the health system, the knowledge drawn from the experience of illness has also changed the patients' roles in many aspects. The importance of ...chronic illness has stimulated the development of patients' education about their illness in order to support them in their symptoms management and to improve their life quality. Several ideal typical roles of patients are nowadays in relation with health professionals: those who consider that their illness brought them experiential knowledge that could be useful to the health system and the society. They are acting with their peers (peer-support), in educational settings (user-trainers, user-researchers), in hospitals (peer-educators). Meanwhile, several organizations lead by ill people and their relatives, have also experienced new relationship with knowledge production, particularly in the case of not academically well known syndromes. This new kind of empowerment of patients as medical knowledge producers can be compared to other new situations in which non-scientists are involved in research processes, such as popular epidemiology or scientific leisure club. All those situations transgress the division of people into those able or unable to deal with scientific issues. Besides, those situations offer an opportunity to try to clarify the idea of 'lay scientific' knowledge, which is a main question for 'science and citizens' programmes. Adapted from the source document.
The paper is focused on the constructions of genders in popular medical discourse in printed news and online information media. It leads to the basic conclusion that an illness or a health problem ...itself is engendered on the level of a syndrome. As the most characteristic and transparent construction of an illness from genders perspective the breast cancer is thematized; the naming itself (in Slovene language) is denoting the exclusion of men, which is in contradiction with the quantitative data related to the phenomenon. At the same time the cultural meaning of women's breasts is being confirmed. Applying the semiotics and criticism of ideology in the analysis of numerous cases the author argues that illnesses, which relate to reproductive anatomy and physiology, are echoed most in the media public -- introducing the 'natural' associative logic of sexual character, which conveys, just like genders, discriminatory meanings. Besides, gender biased and sexualized is also the understanding of pain and the instance of care in interpersonal relations related to illnesses and health problems. Adapted from the source document.
Hospital social work in Slovene health care sector is neither formally recognized nor has its proper standards and norms. Tasks and duties carried out by a social worker at the Clinical Institute of ...Clinical Neurophysiology are much more extensive in their contents than tasks and duties of social workers in health care sector. The nature of work derives from medical viewpoint, because the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease requires that everything is provided quickly, economically and with the least effort for patient and its family. In a master's degree the survey that estimates contents of a social worker's tasks and duties in the Group for the treatment of people suffering from ALS was conducted. It was important to ascertain how much of the contents pertain to activities of social work and how much to activities of a coordinator. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
