The Relationship of Drug Use to Suicide Ideation and Attempts Among African American,Hispanic, and White Non-Hispanic Male Adolescents

This study presents self-report cross-sectional and longitudinal data on associations between drug use, suicide ideation, and attempts in a multiethnic sample of seventh- and eighth-grade male adolescents attending school in the greater Miami, Florida, area. African Americans had the highest prevalence of 6-month ideation (20.5%), and Haitians had the highest attempts (11.4%). For the total sample, tranquilizers had the highest odds ratio for ideation (3.4), and PCP for attempts (6.2). Psychoactive drug-use was consistently related to attempts among Hispanics, white non-Hispanics, and African Americans. Acculturation strains interacted with cocaine and crack to predict suicide attempts among Hispanic respondents.     

Tradition and Experimentation: the Development of the Samatha Trust

ABSTRACT

Theravāda Buddhism has travelled. This article gives some history of the practice of samatha breathing mindfulness, in the Theravāda tradition, in the UK. It first gives some background in Britain to the arrival of the meditation in the 1960s, then summarises the life of Nai Boonman Poonyathiro, who introduced this method into the UK, a story that is not generally known. The paper describes some aspects of the development of the Samatha Trust in the UK, attempting to show ways a system that was popular in Thailand when it arrived in a new region has prospered, even while becoming markedly less prominent in its own regions. As I am a practitioner in this tradition, before the conclusion I make some personal comment. To conclude, I speculate about features which appear to characterise Buddhist groups in general in the UK, before considering ways that this specialised tradition has adapted in a new setting.