Patient Co-Participation in Narrative Medicine Curricula as a Means of Engaging Patients as Partners in Healthcare: A Pilot Study Involving Medical Students and Patients Living with HIV

Journal of Medical Humanities - This paper describes a pilot study of a new model for narrative medicine training, “community-based participatory narrative medicine” (CBPNM), which...     

The Prevalence of and Psychosocial Risks for Suicide Attempts in Male and Female College Students in Taiwan

The prevalence of and psychosocial risks for suicide attempts was investigated in college students in Taiwan by gender, after controlling for depressive symptoms. Self‐reported data were collected from a nationally representative sample of 2,835 college students; 11.90% of females and 8.87% of males reported they had attempted suicide in the preceding 12 months. After controlling for depression, suicidal ideations were associated with suicide attempts in females, whereas there were fewer positive expectations toward the future associated with suicide attempts in males. Several explanations for the high prevalence of suicide attempts among college students in Taiwan were discussed. In the future, further verification of the findings is necessary.     

Changing Perspective: Building Creative Mindsets

The search for new ideas often frustratingly cycles back to old ones, a phenomenon known as fixation. Recent research has shown ways to kick-start finding new uses for familiar objects, a prototypical creativity task: wandering in the mind or the world or working on a messy desk. Those techniques seem to succeed by helping break fixation, but do not guide the search for new ideas. The perspective-taking or human-centric or empathic mindset championed by many in HCI and in design firms does provide a search strategy. We compared the mind-wandering mindset to a perspective-taking mindset, the latter priming thinking of ways that people in different roles (gardener, artist, etc.) might use the objects. In two studies, the Perspective-Taking mindset yielded more ideas and more original ideas than Mind-Wandering, which did not differ from a No-Mindset control. Original ideas came late, rewarding persistence. The perspective-taking mindset is productive for problem-solving, forecasting, and social interactions as well as innovation.