Suicide Ideation and Attempts among Low‐Income African American Adolescents

We examined the impact of risk and protective factors on the odds that African American adolescents seriously think about or attempt suicide. Data from students in grades 5–12 in a mostly urban, southeastern U.S. school district were analyzed. Findings support earlier work documenting differences in gender and grades. Risk factors were uniformly significant in understanding both ideation and attempts. Protective factors were not consistent predictors; the lowering role of religious protective factors was limited, though student's belonging to or their perception of belonging to a spiritual community was a significant factor in lowering the odds of suicide ideation.     

The research agenda: the vital need for empirical research in child psychotherapy

In this paper I shall describe how work discussion groups offered to staff on-site as part of a mental health in schools outreach project can have a significant impact on the thinking, attitudes and culture within a school. Through the use of some detailed examples of these work discussion groups in action, I hope to illustrate the way these groups can enable staff to enhance their observational skills, develop a deeper understanding of the factors that impact on learning, behaviour and teaching, and reduce staff stress. Finally, I hope to highlight the ways in which such groups not only extend staff skills in engaging with pupils at risk of emotional breakdown and school exclusion, but can also promote a learning environment for all, in which development and growth is promoted at a personal, professional and whole-school level.     

The Liar Paradox and the Inclosure Schema

In Beyond the Limits of Thought [2002], Graham Priest argues that logical and semantic paradoxes have the same underlying structure (which he calls the Inclosure Schema). He also argues that, in conjunction with the Principle of Uniform Solution (same kind of paradox, same kind of solution), this is sufficient to ‘sink virtually all orthodox solutions to the paradoxes’, because the orthodox solutions to the paradoxes are not uniform. I argue that Priest fails to provide a non-question-begging method to ‘sink virtually all orthodox solutions’, and that the Inclosure Schema cannot be the structure that underlies the Liar paradox. Moreover, Ramsey was right in thinking that logical and semantic paradoxes are paradoxes of different kinds.     

The internal family and the facts of life

Primitive defensive mechanisms innvolving splitting and projections are an essential process in the development of the infant. However, if these persist into adult life unmitigated by more depressive processes involving introjection and awareness of secure good objects they are shown to be inadequate to the task of coping with life crises, based as they are on the denial and distortion of reality. In this paper, I describe two patients who were seen in very different treatment settings and in whom such mechanisms were predominant. These began to fail when the patients were faced with difficult external events. These caused feelings of panic about impending mental disintegration. I then show how these patients sought to re-establish their primitive defensive structures.     

The uses of humor in life,neurosis and in psychotherapy: Part 1

Abstract

Joy and sadness, the comic and the tragic, making jokes and telling jokes, have been known in life, literature, the theater, and art since the dawn of civilization. Following in the footsteps of classical antiquity, Freud added to the philosophical analysis of humor the insights offered by the psychoanalytic method. The bridge was the cathartic method of treating neuroses, where discharge of affect was one of the foundations of technique, and the cathartic, or discharge, function of humor. Freud's analysis of humor, that “A joke … is the most social of all mental functions that aim at a yield of pleasure” introduces Freud's first explicit formulation of an interpersonal approach to the human situation in health and disorder.     

Lifetime history of cigarette smoking associated with aggression and impulsivity in both healthy and personality disordered volunteers

Cigarette smoking has been associated with several personality and behavioral traits including impulsivity and aggression, primarily in adolescents and/or pregnant women. In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that history of cigarette smoking is also associated with dimensional measures of aggression and impulsivity in adult subjects. Subjects were 179 personality disordered (PD), and healthy volunteer control (HV), subjects in whom history of cigarette smoking and measures of both aggression and impulsivity were collected. Scores on measures of both aggression and impulsivity were elevated as a function of personality disorder status and history of cigarette smoking status; no interaction between these two factors were noted on these measures. Including socio-economic status and global psychosocial functioning in the model eliminated the difference associated with diagnostic grouping and impulsivity but not the difference in aggression associated with lifetime history of smoking. These data suggest that lifetime history of cigarette smoking is associated with elevations in life history of aggression regardless of the presence of psychiatric disorder in nontreatment seeking individuals.