��Is Getting Well Ever An Art?��: Psychopharmacology and Madness in Robert Lowell��s Day by Day

On the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959, some critics were shocked by the poet's use of seemingly frank autobiographical material, in particular the portrayal of his hospitalizations for bipolar disorder. During the late fifties and throughout the sixties, a rich vein, influenced by Lowell, developed in American poetry. Also during this time, the nascent science of psychopharmacology competed with and complemented the more established somatic treatments, such as psychosurgery, shock treatments, and psychoanalytical therapies. The development of Thorazine was a remarkable breakthrough allowing patients previously thought incurable to leave hospital. In 1955, the release of Miltown, the first 'minor' tranquilizer, was heralded with a media fanfare promising a new dawn of psychological cure-all. These two events blurred the boundary between 'normality' and madness by making treatment in the community more widely possible and by medicalizing more commonplace distress. Lowell's early depictions of madness situate it as emblematic of the cultural malaise of 'the tranquilized fifties.' By his final collection, Day by Day (1977), mental illness had lost its symbolic power. These late poems explore the power of art as a way of representing and remedying suffering in a culture where psychopharmacology has normalized madness.     

Transmettre la relation de service par l’interaction tutorale: le cas des facteurs

Based on data gathered from naturalistic observation, the article analyses the communicative activity implemented by postmen involved in tutoring users and their apprentices. The occupational situation observed is that of mail distribution, and the critical moments selected are those which bring customer relations into play. We examine the role of the other in the way three tutors pass on their customer relations skills. We show that their means of interaction and understanding situations differ widely.     

Perinatal maternal undernutrition programs the offspring hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis

There is now compelling evidence, coming both from animal and human studies that an early exposure to undernutrition is frequently associated with low birth weight and programs HPA axis alterations throughout the lifespan. Although animal models have reported conflicting findings arising from differences in experimental paradigms and species, they have clearly demonstrated that such programming not only affects the brain but also the pituitary corticotrophs and the adrenal cortex. In fetuses, maternal undernutrition reduces HPA axis function and implicates a reduction of placental 11beta-HSD2 activity and a greater transplacental transfer of glucocorticoids (GRs). In young adults, usually only fine HPA axis alterations were observed, whereas in older ones, maternal undernutrition was frequently associated with chronic hyperactivity of this neuroendocrine axis. In humans, evidence of HPA axis dysregulation in people who were small at birth has recently emerged. Thus, we suggest that such alterations in adults may be implicated in the aetiology of several disorders related to the metabolic syndrome as well as to immune or inflammatory diseases. To reverse such programming, recent experimental reports have shown that postnatal environmental interventions, dietary modifications and the use of agents modulating the epigenomic state could partly restore physiological functions and thus open new therapeutic strategies.     

Memory for item order and phonetic recoding in the beginning reader

A defect in immediate memory for item order is often attributed to poor beginning readers. We have supposed that this problem may be a manifestation of an underlying deficiency in the use of phonetic codes. Accordingly, we expected good and poor readers to differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. The purpose of the present study was to test this hypothesis by examining the ability of good and poor readers to reconstruct the order of sets of briefly presented stimuli that varied in the extent to which they could be distinctively recoded into phonetic form: pictures of common objects versus nonrepresentational, “doodle” drawings. As expected, an interaction between reading ability and type of stimulus item was found, demonstrating the material-specific nature of poor readers' ordering difficulties. These findings support the hypothesis that a function of the phonetic representation is to aid in retention of order information, and that poor readers' ordering difficulties are related to their deficient use of phonetic codes.