What Can the Systems Community Contribute to Ensure the Survival of Civilization

Much of what we need to plan for our survival is already known, but what we know, how we know, and who knows is divided up between disciplines. Thus much of the problem of ensuring our survival is a matter of learning across the disciplines. We identify four modes through which we bring disciplinary knowledge together: the unity of science, integrated assessment, heuristic models, and distributed learning networks. Although none of them are perfect, we can learn how to put our knowledge together across the disciplines much better than we do.     

Who uses community mental health centres? A study of one health district

A caseload analysis was undertaken to investigate those clients seen by five community mental health centre teams within one healthcare district. The 985 clients are described in terms of demographic and clinical features and questions relating to service provision are discussed.     

Recognition and recall of invisible objects

Three experiments examined recognition and recall of items that people imagined as being invisible. When one item hid another, the hidden item suffered in recognition, but so did the one that remained visible; the demand to imagine items invisibly made both items less recognizable than in control conditions. Cued recall did not depend on whether the visible item or the invisible item was the cue, but it did depend on whether the initial task required relational processing of the items. When both items were invisible in a dark imaginary scene, there was a general loss in all measures of memory, including memory for the scene. None of the results requires recourse to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle that memory depends on the visual characteristics of images. The results attest, instead, to the importance of the informational characteristics of memorial records.     

Career Indecision: A Summary of the Research and Implications for Counselling

The vocationally-indecisive individual presents a major counselling problem. The theory and research behind career indecision is discussed and a counselling approach based on identity formation is outlined. Four identity statuses — Identity Achievements, Foreclosures, Identity Diffusions, and Moratoriums — are described and counselling approaches for each are explored.     

Prophetic visions in 1988: A critical reappraisal

This paper reviews the research into a specific aspect of neardeath experiences (NDEs): the prophetic vision (PV). PVs are subjectively compelling flashforwards of planetary-wide cataclysms and eventual regeneration that sometimes occur during or in the immediate aftermath of an NDE. Previous research has shown that the most frequently mentioned year for the culmination of the geophysical calamities foreseen in PVs was 1988. I argue that PVs should be understood as manifestations of a collective prophetic impulse that historically tends to arise during periods of cultural crisis. PVs are thus expressions of the felt need for cultural renewal and therefore should not be taken literally as prognostic of drastic physical changes on Earth.