Kierkegaard's Critique of Eudaimonism: A Reassessment

Interpreters are less univocal than one might think in assessing Søren Kierkegaard's attitude toward eudaimonism. Through an analysis of several key texts from across Kierkegaard's authorship, I argue that existing interpretations do not convincingly address the relationship between Kierkegaard's critique of eudaimonism and his mid‐nineteenth‐century context, which was dominated by post‐Kantian idealists. While I am sympathetic to aspects of deontological and aretaic interpretations, a contextual reading shows that his critique centers on what he diagnoses as the enclosure of the modern self. This puts his critique of eudaimonism in the purview of his moral psychology and in continuity with his critique of romanticism.     

Experiences of surgery readiness assessments in British Columbia

Abstract

Background: A surgical readiness assessment is a major step in the medical journey of trans people seeking gender-affirming surgery. Much of the peer-reviewed literature surrounding surgical readiness assessments emphasizes the perspectives of academics and clinicians, leaving the voices of trans and gender diverse patients largely unheard.

Aims: This paper foregrounds patient experiences with surgery readiness assessments to discuss the tensions, challenges and opportunities they generate.

Methods: We conducted a thematic analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with trans people who accessed or were seeking to access gender-affirming surgery in British Columbia.

Results: We developed three main themes to capture participants’ narratives of their surgical assessment experiences. The first, assessments as gatekeeping, explores the stories of people who described their assessments as outdated and even discriminatory processes. The second, assessments as a barrier to care, discusses the informational missteps, bureaucratic regulations, economic issues, and geographic concerns that made assessments difficult to access. The third, assessments as useful, includes positive stories about assessments that often involved feeling supported by an assessor and feeling prepared for the next steps.

Discussion: These narratives demonstrate how much variation exists among people’s experiences of readiness assessments for gender-affirming surgery. No matter how their actual assessment turned out, many participants approached their appointments with a great deal of anxiety and trepidation. We attributed this stress was to challenges ranging from lengthy wait times, arbitrary medical gatekeeping, a lack of access to knowledgeable and supportive providers, unclear or changing administrative processes, and insufficient communication. To address these challenges, it is crucial for the medical system to create more accessible pathways with centralized, up-to-date information for people trying to access assessments. Patients are best served by multi-disciplinary gender-affirming teams that provide individualized care.     

Putting Animals on the Theological Agenda

Book reviewed in this article:
Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto eds, Animals on the Agenda.     

Evaluation of The Practitioner Online Referral and Treatment Service (PORTS): the first 18 months of a state-wide digital service for adults with anxiety,depression, or substance use problems

ABSTRACT

The Practitioner Online Referral and Treatment Service (PORTS) is a new digital mental health service (DMHS) providing assessment, treatment, and consultation across Western Australia, for adults with anxiety, depression, or substance use problems, and experiencing financial hardship or geographical disadvantage. From July 2017 to December 2018, a total of 2,527 individuals were referred to PORTS. Of these, 150 (6%) did not give consent for their results to be analysed. Of the remaining 2,377 patients, 615 (26%) could not be contacted to confirm the referral, 596 (25%) received assessment or information from PORTS, 427 (18%) were referred to another service, and 739 (31%) commenced treatment at PORTS. Almost half (47%) of patients were from areas with significant socio-economic disadvantage. Those referred by another mental health service were more likely to engage in treatment than those referred by a General Practitioner (GP). Overall outcomes were excellent, with large effect sizes (Cohen’s d: 1.1–1.4), from assessment to post-treatment and 3-month follow-up, reliable deterioration was low, and GP and patient satisfaction was high. These results indicate that the PORTS DMHS model is a promising method for engaging primary care patients with anxiety and depression, including those experiencing financial and geographical disadvantage.     

A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Spiritual Conversion in a Neo-Charismatic Evangelical Context

Journal of Religion and Health - Hermeneutic phenomenology was used to illuminate the lived experience of posttraumatic, born-again conversion among members of a Neo-Charismatic Evangelical church...     

Tailored interventions for motivating smoking cessation: using placebo tailoring to examine the influence of expectancies and personalization.

The present study examined mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of tailored interventions for motivating smoking cessation. The study used a placebo-tailoring design to test whether the efficacy of tailoring was due, in part, to personalized features in addition to the theoretically based content. Two hundred forty adult smokers were randomized to 1 of 3 conditions: standard booklet, minimally personalized booklet, or extensively personalized booklet. The interventions varied in their degree of ostensible tailoring, yet the actual smoking-related content of the booklets was identical. A dose-response relationship was hypothesized, with the greatest apparent tailoring producing the most positive outcomes. This pattern was found for evaluation of the booklets, with trends for readiness to change and self-efficacy increases. Moreover, as hypothesized, the effect of the interventions on readiness was moderated by participants' expectancies about tailoring.