Suicide Prevention in Australian Aboriginal Communities: A Review of Past and Present Programs

A review of Aboriginal suicide prevention programs were conducted to highlight promising projects and strategies. A content analysis of gray literature was conducted to identify interventions reported to have an impact in reducing suicidal rates and behaviors. Most programs targeted the whole community and were delivered through workshops, cultural activities, or creative outlets. Curriculums included suicide risk and protective factors, warning signs, and mental health. Many programs were poorly documented and evaluations did not include suicidal outcomes. Most evaluations considered process variables. Results from available outcome evaluations suggest that employing a whole of community approach and focusing on connectedness, belongingness and cultural heritage may be of benefit. Despite the challenges, there is a clear need to evaluate outcomes if prevention is to be progressed.     

“Am iz kwiin” (I’m his queen): Combining interpretative phenomenological analysis with a feminist approach to work with gems in a resource-constrained setting

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on working with gems using a feminist approach to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in a resource-constrained setting. The research explores the experiences of maternal disclosure of HIV to children of HIV positive mothers in Kingston, Jamaica. A feminist approach helps recognise power imbalances within research relationships and the women’s lived experiences. We present three “gems” which illuminate women’s lived experiences and explore how popularised representations of women’s sexuality and mothering influence disclosure discourses. We use emotion work as a conceptual resource to structure the women’s narratives and challenge existing policy discourses, which arguably represent disclosure within a binary, rationalist, decision-making framework. This article adds to global literature on maternal HIV disclosure and problematises policy discourses by bringing into relief the emotion work women engage in when deciding if and how to communicate their HIV status to their children. It adds to the body of research using IPA, particularly in resource-constrained settings where IPA has thus far had little application.     

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACT

Perceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.