Suchttherapie bei abhängigen Ärzten

Background

International studies indicate an increased incidence of substance abuse disorders among physicians. This article investigates specific variables in the work field and describes existing treatment programs.

Patients and methods

In a cross-sectional study 107 physicians with and 468 without substance abuse disorders were compared. Two highly developed treatment programs in Germany and Canada are described.

Results

The high work-load associated with the medical work environment leads to reduced performance and social isolation. Treatment programs for addicted physicians work with the concept of ?help before restriction“. The abstinence rate of the 5-year Canadian program is over 90%.

Conclusions

As a form of prevention, medical students should be systematically informed about work-related stress in the medical profession. Structured treatment programs should be implemented nationwide. The expert team ?Risk of addiction in physicians“ of the German Addiction Foundation, whose members are authors of this article, may be a small step in this direction.     

The Frequency of Suicide in Individual Danish Birth Cohorts, 1922–1991

In recent years many suicidologists have based their epidemiological studies on suicide on theories assuming that people born within the same period of time will follow the same suicidal patterns throughout their lives, and that variations in the annual rate of suicide will, therefore, reflect systematic differences between cohorts. Cohort analysis carried out on Danish data showed, however, that although some differences could be found as to the course of events during the life span of the cohorts and also when the material was adjusted for sex, no significant differences could be found between various birth cohorts in the total rates of suicide. The authors argue that the reason for this is that a cohort effect is only one of three dimensions of an analytical tool, namely, Age–Period–Cohort (APC) analysis, and that the balance between the three effects changes over time.     

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words. These include nearly all lemmas language researchers are likely to be interested in. The ratings are freely available for research purposes.     

Begging the Question: A Qualified Defense

This discussion examines two of the central notions at work in Sterba’s From Rationality to Equality: question-beggingness, and the notion of a rational requirement. I point out that, against certain unreasonable positions, begging the question is a perfectly reasonable option. I also argue that if we use the sense of “rational requirement” that philosophers ought (and tend) to have in mind when defending the idea that morality is rationally required, then Sterba has not succeed in defending this idea. Rather, he has at most demonstrated the rational preferability of morality over two other positions: an extreme egoism, and a very particular form of altruism. But another position exists: one that holds altruistic reasons to exist, and to be capable of justifying sacrifices, but that also holds that they do not require us to sacrifice our interests in the way that morality sometimes does require.     

Sexually Explicit Media and Sexual Risk Behavior in a Sample of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Norway

The aim of this study was to explore the association between the consumption of sexually explicit media (SEM) depicting condom and non-condom use and HIV/STI-related sexual risk behavior among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Norway. We also explored whether the association between SEM consumption and STI-related sexual risk behavior is mediated by men’s sexual self-esteem and/or condom use self-efficacy. A cross-sectional online survey study was carried out in Norway in 2012. The final sample comprised 529 MSM in Norway. There was a bivariate association between the use of SEM picturing condom use and less STI-related sexual risk behavior. Further, the association between SEM consumption and sexual risk behavior was mediated by condom use self-efficacy. However, SEM did not influence sexual risk behavior via sexual self-esteem. The results offer important cross-cultural validation of recent comparative data from the US and may be used to promote HIV/STI prevention, in the sense that the actors in SEM may serve as role models in managing condom use in sexual contexts.     

Neo-pragmatism,morality, and the specification problem

Abstract

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.     

Alternative Recipes for Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Five World Regions

In most cross-national research on Life Satisfaction (LS) an implicit assumption appears to be that the correlates of LS are the same the world over; ‘one size fits all’. Using data from the World Values Survey (1999–2014), we question this assumption by assessing the effects of differing personal values/life priorities on LS in five world regions: the West, Latin America, the Asian-Confucian region, ex-Communist Eastern Europe, and the Communist countries of China and Vietnam. We indicate that differing values - traditional family values, friendship and leisure values, materialistic values, political values, prosocial and environmental values, and religious values – are endorsed to varying degrees in different parts of the world, and vary in whether they have positive or negative effects on LS. Personal values provide the basis for alternative ‘recipes’ affecting LS. By ‘recipes’ we mean linked set of values, attitudes, behavioural choices and domain satisfactions that have a positive or negative effect on LS. We estimate structural equation models which indicate that differing values-based recipes help to account for large, unexpected differences between mean levels of LS in the five world regions, compared with the levels ‘predicted’ by GDP per capita. In particular, the high priority given to traditional family and religious recipes in Latin America helps to account for unexpectedly high LS in that region. Deficits in prosocial attitudes and behaviours partly account for low LS in ex-Communist Eastern Europe.