scholarly journals Coloniality and Mental Health, Neurological and Substance Abuse (MNS) Disorders in Guyana’s Prisons Today

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Queenela Cameron ◽  
Dylan Kerrigan

There is a relationship between the social actions and social structures laid down during colonialism, and the social hierarchies and inequalities that developed as British Guiana moved slowly from British colony to Independent Guyana. From slavery and indigenous marginalisation, to indentureship and colonial social relations, modern Guyana emerges from the legacies of an Imperial project, and most notably “enslavement, immigration, and population management” (Anderson 2019). In the context of Guyana’s prisons today, the echoes and ghosts of this Imperial project can be said to still haunt the grounds and insides of these decaying buildings, as well as stalking the lives and minds of inmates themselves.

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


Ranking ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Péter Érdi

This chapter studies how social ranking in humans emerged as the result of an evolutionary process. It starts with the story of the discovery of pecking order among chickens by a Norwegian boy. Both animals and humans need a healthy balance between cooperation and competition to ensure evolutionarily efficient strategies. The biological machinery behind social ranking is discussed. There are two distinct mechanisms for navigating the social ladder: dominance and prestige. Dominance, an evolutionarily older strategy, is based on the ability to intimidate other members in the group by physical size and strength. The group members don’t accept dominance-based social rank freely, only by coercion. Members of a colony fight, and the winners of these fights will be accepted as “dominants” and the losers as “subordinates.” The naturally formed hierarchy serves as a way to prevent superfluous fighting and injuries within a colony. Prestige, as a strategy, is evolutionarily younger and is based on skills and knowledge as appraised by the community. Prestige hierarchies are maintained by the consent of the community, without pressure being applied by particular members. The mechanisms of forming and maintaining social hierarchies are described. Social structures, both hierarchies and network organizations, are reviewed. Discussion of these structures is carried over to social and political history and the tension between democracy and authoritarianism.


Author(s):  
Anke Reichenbach

AbstractThis paper explores three interrelated aspects of young Bahraini women’s laughter: the subjects and genres of their humor, the social relationships between the women involved with a particular focus on homo-social friendships, and their humor’s potential as an instrument of resistance or social control. After discussing local ideals of femininity, the paper analyzes three distinct genres of humorous conversation: self-mockery, mutual teasing, and joking about absent third parties. The data show that the ambiguity of humour allowed for great freedom regarding women’s play with gendered identities and the expression of critical views on Bahrain’s gender hierarchy. Simultaneously, different kinds of humor were employed to negotiate closeness or distance in social relations. Among women friends, humor was often drastic, intimate, aggressive, and revelled in the taboo subjects of Bahraini society. Through humor, women questioned existing gender ideals and played with alternative identities. Their laughter, however, also served to maintain conventional ideas about “proper” women and confirmed existing social hierarchies. Thus, Bahraini women’s humor captured the contradictions and ambiguities of their fragmented and hybrid social environment replete with the uncertainties accompanying rapid social change.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (11) ◽  
pp. 1029-1037
Author(s):  
John Price

Darwin's theory of sexual selection offers a challenge to psychology and psychiatry. We select each other, and have been doing so since social life first evolved. But who is selected and what happens to those who are not selected? What social structures have evolved to contain the unselected? What behaviours have evolved to manage the selection process? How do the selected relate to the unselected and what behaviours have evolved to manage this asymmetry in social relations? What mental states have evolved to characterize the selected and the unselected? These questions should be kept in mind when we observe and study the social structures, behaviours and mental states that we see displayed before us in all the variety of nature. It is suggested that a significant amount of current psychiatric disorder, especially depressive states and both social and generalized anxiety disorder, have evolved because they managed the processes of being unselected and de-selected, and maintained the unselected in that social role without loss of life or physical incapacity, and enabled the unselected to contribute to general social well-being.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1247-1261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah K. McKenzie ◽  
Sunny Collings ◽  
Gabrielle Jenkin ◽  
Jo River

Men’s mental health has remained undertheorized, particularly in terms of the gendered nature of men’s social relations. While the importance of social connections and strong supportive networks for improving mental health and well-being is well documented, we know little about men’s social support networks or how men go about seeking or mobilizing social support. An in-depth understanding of the gendered nature of men’s social connections and the ways in which the interplay between masculinity and men’s social connections can impact men’s mental health is needed. Fifteen life history interviews were undertaken with men in the community. A theoretical framework of gender relations was used to analyze the men’s interviews. The findings provide rich insights into men’s diverse patterns of practice in regards to seeking or mobilizing social support. While some men differentiated between their social connections with men and women, others experienced difficulties in mobilizing support from existing connections. Some men maintained a desire to be independent, rejecting the need for social support, whereas others established support networks from which they could actively seek support. Overall, the findings suggest that patterns of social connectedness among men are diverse, challenging the social science literature that frames all men’s social relationships as being largely instrumental, and men as less able and less interested than women in building emotional and supportive relationships with others. The implications of these findings for promoting men’s social connectedness and mental health are discussed.


Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1403
Author(s):  
Yiming Ma ◽  
Changyong Liang ◽  
Xuejie Yang ◽  
Haitao Zhang ◽  
Shuping Zhao ◽  
...  

Older people with hearing impairment are more likely to develop depressive symptoms due to physical disability and loss of social communication. This study investigated the effects of social media on social relations, subjective aging, and depressive symptoms in these older adults based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework. It provides new empirical evidence to support improving the mental health and rebuilding the social relations of older people. A formal questionnaire was designed using the Wenjuanxing platform and distributed online through WeChat; 643 valid questionnaires were received from older people with self-reported hearing impairments, and SmartPLS 3.28 was used to analyze the data. The results show that (1) social media significantly impacts the social relations of older people with hearing impairment (social networks, β = 0.132, T = 3.444; social support, β = 0.129, T = 2.95; social isolation, β = 0.107, T = 2.505). (2) For these older people, social isolation has the biggest impact on their psychosocial loss (β = 0.456, T = 10.458), followed by the impact of social support (β = 0.103, T = 2.014); a hypothesis about social network size was not confirmed (β = 0.007, T = 0.182). Both social media (β = 0.096, T = 2.249) and social support (β = 0.174, T = 4.434) significantly affect the self-efficacy of hearing-impaired older people. (3) Both subjective aging (psychosocial loss, β = 0.260, T = 6.036; self-efficacy, β = 0.106, T = 3.15) and social isolation (β = 0.268, T = 6.307) significantly affect depressive symptoms in older people with hearing impairment. This study expands the theories of social media aging cognition, social support, and social networks and can provide practical contributions to the social media use and mental health of special persons 60 years and older.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
RENAUD MORIEUX

ABSTRACTDuring the wars of the eighteenth century, French prisoners on parole in Britain were placed in a paradoxical situation of captives with privileges. Instead of studying these men as if they dwelt in a world apart, this article focuses on captivity zones as a social laboratory, where people of different status would socialize. These spaces accordingly provide a lens through which to glimpse the repercussions of international conflicts at the level of local communities. The disputes which opposed these captives to the English population, which were the object of letters of complaints sent by the French prisoners to the authorities, shed light on the normative and moral resources which were used by eighteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen to legitimize themselves in situations of social conflict. As a configuration characterized by shifting social relations, the parole zone brought together local, national, and international issues, intertwined primarily in the rhetoric of honour. In these incidents, there was no systematic alignment of class and national discourses and actions, while the precise standing of these Frenchmen on the social ladder was constantly challenged and debated. The resulting quarrels therefore reveal a series of social inversions: dominant groups in France were in many respects dominated in England. Rather than being a mere reflection of pre-existing social hierarchies, such micro-incidents reinvented them.


Author(s):  
Daniel Briggs ◽  
Rubén Monge Gamero

Valdemingómez, however, revolves around its own norms and codes which defy and violate conventional everyday conceptions of normative behaviour. This congregation of crime, violence and victimization in a spatial and legal no-mans land like Valdemingómez means that grave misdemeanours occur without consequences and violence is normalized part of the everyday fabric of social life. For this reason, in Valdemingómez almost anything goes and this produces a series of tensions in the social hierarchies that are attached to cultural interactions in the area which permeate elements of work and labour, the moral economy, daily life and social relations. In this chapter, we take a detailed look at the cultural milieu of Valdemingómez and its operations, and show how people survive there and how the various players attempt to foster some self-respect from these harsh realities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis E. C. Rocha ◽  
Jan Ryckebusch ◽  
Koen Schoors ◽  
Matthew Smith

AbstractSocial animals self-organise to create groups to increase protection against predators and productivity. One-to-one interactions are the building blocks of these emergent social structures and may correspond to friendship, grooming, communication, among other social relations. These structures should be robust to failures and provide efficient communication to compensate the costs of forming and maintaining the social contacts but the specific purpose of each social interaction regulates the evolution of the respective social networks. We collate 611 animal social networks and show that the number of social contacts E scales with group size N as a super-linear power-law $$E=CN^\beta$$ E = C N β for various species of animals, including humans, other mammals and non-mammals. We identify that the power-law exponent $$\beta$$ β varies according to the social function of the interactions as $$\beta = 1+a/4$$ β = 1 + a / 4 , with $$a \approx {1,2,3,4}$$ a ≈ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . By fitting a multi-layer model to our data, we observe that the cost to cross social groups also varies according to social function. Relatively low costs are observed for physical contact, grooming and group membership which lead to small groups with high and constant social clustering. Offline friendship has similar patterns while online friendship shows weak social structures. The intermediate case of spatial proximity (with $$\beta =1.5$$ β = 1.5 and clustering dependency on network size quantitatively similar to friendship) suggests that proximity interactions may be as relevant for the spread of infectious diseases as for social processes like friendship.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. McLeod ◽  
Zackery D.O. Dunnells ◽  
Burcu Ozturk

In the United States criminal justice system, female sexual offenders are among the most unrepresented groups of individuals, and they have evaded detection and/or prosecution for many reasons. This chapter explores the characteristics and patterns of female sexual offenders based on the collection of available literature. We will discuss how personal trauma histories, mental health, substance abuse, and motivations of female sexual offenders differ from their male counterparts. Additionally, we cover how social perception presents female sexual offenders in a light that adversely impacts their interactions with the social systems and explore empirically validated myths, risks, and interventions for this population.


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