A comparative study of mental health diagnoses, symptoms, treatment, and medication use among Orthodox Jews

Historical clinical reports and media narratives suggest that Orthodox Jews are reticent to seek treatment for mental illness, present only with serious concerns, and hesitate to comply with treatment in general and psychopharmacology in particular. On the other hand, recent developments, and some limited research, suggest that Orthodox Jews may be likely to seek and comply with treatment. The current study compared the diagnostic, symptomatic, and treatment characteristics of 191 Orthodox Jews and 154 control patients all presenting to a large private mental health clinic with offices throughout greater New York. Results indicated that the groups were largely demographically similar, and that their diagnoses did not significantly differ. Orthodox Jews initially presented with lower levels of symptoms, terminated with similar symptom levels, attended a similar number of sessions, and were equally likely to use psychopharmacological interventions of similar types, compared to controls. This was equally true of ultra-Orthodox and modern Orthodox Jews. Clinicians providing mental health services to Orthodox Jews should be aware of these findings, which contrast with existing clinical and popular stereotypes. Further, excessive efforts to protect Orthodox Jewish patients against stigma may be unnecessary and counterproductive.

Echoes of Empire: racism and historical amnesia in the British media coverage of migration

This paper looks at how the British media addressed the issue of migration in Europe between 2015 and 2018, four years when the topic was high on news and political agendas, due to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and the UK’s debate on Britain’s relationship with the European Union and free movement of people. Based on a sample of 400 articles from two national newspapers, The Guardian and The Times, the paper compares the content and discourse between the left-wing and right-wing press. The paper argues that media representations turn refugees into ‘migrants’ and portray them as either a threat to the national economy and security or as passive victims of distant circumstances. The study historicizes these media narratives and reveals that the discourse they employ advances the racialised mix of knowledge and historical amnesia and reproduces the age-old hierarchies of the colonial system which divided humans into superior and inferior species. Migrant voice is largely missing from the coverage. History, that could explain the causes of ‘migration’, the distant conflicts and Britain’s role in them, is also nowhere to be found. The paper considers the exclusion of history and migrant voices from stories told to the British audience and reflects on their domestic and international implications.

Trailblazer or a One-off?

The paper attempts to analyse the international success of the Danish televisual series Rita (TV2 Denmark - Netflix, 2012-2020). It places the production in a wider cultural and historical context and treats it as an exemplification of, what the author deems, a recent shift in representations of teachers in visual media narratives. The author’s argumentation is premised on three principal assumptions. First, Rita demonstrates that after the genre’s decline at the turn of the twentieth century, the school-centred audio-visual narratives are back in favour. The trend is connected to the growth of the post-network television and the so-called over-the-top services (OTT). Second, the substantial part of Rita’s wide appeal is related to the show’s innovative application of the conventions known from the earlier Scandinavian productions and themes from serials about “difficult women”. This particularly concerns the show’s adept exploration of the resilient and anti-heroic female lead character. Third, Rita is regarded as an early indication of the shift in the ways school life and teachers are represented in the media today. The author stipulates that the show may augur the emergence of many similar complex televisual images of teachers in the near future.

Savoring Authenticity: Food Consumption and Nostalgia in Japan

The Japanese culinary tradition and contemporary food-related values are often characterised by an emotional and evocative tone that can be traced back to nostalgia, a global multidimensional phenomenon that blends cultural anxieties, sentimental values and sense of place. The desire to remember home through food consumption, as a valuable way of approaching the past, enables the construction or redefinition of ethnic identities, cultural boundaries and a sense of uniqueness. This paper offers some introductory reflections on present-day practices and affective aspects related to Japanese food culture from the point of view of their symbolic meaning in media narratives.

2084: The Fantasy Compact

<p>For the last two decades, social media has increasingly dominated our day to day interactions. We have evolved into digitized creatures able to communicate on a daily basis to a broad and varied audience, comprised of people we know, people we hardly know, and people we have never met. Through images, tweets, status updates and posts, everyone has an ability to view and harness a variety of opinions, emotions, stories and ideas at a moment’s notice. It’s in those instances when a person resonates with a certain moment or place they are in, that they create a narrative through a caption or a hashtag that’s attached to an image which allows everyone who views it to read a story of someone’s experience. This digital/virtual age poses new questions for interior architecture, a practice that generally orients itself in the realm of physical, built space. It is the intent of this research to offer a new kind of design approach, more relevant to our current digitized lives, to see what it might offer for urban interior speculations. Through exploring ways of tapping into this narrative and ‘flipping the script’, we can explore a new kind of design tactic that brings forward the power that social media narratives can have on the built environment and interior strategies. The city of Los Angeles will be used as a testing grounds for narrative urban interior tactics, to see how it could offer the city whimsical and outlandish interventions that respond to the people currently interacting with certain sites in it. As a nod to George Orwell’s 1984 future speculations, this project is a counterpoint that offers an optimistic, open and free speculation tool by providing a constant dialogue between the public and designer through the forum of Instagram. This project teases out the ideas that narrative can create instinctual, intuitive and thought-provoking designs that can be spectacles, attractors, events or counterparts that open up a potential to talk about interior in a new realm, where it can contribute on larger scales like the urban setting. Urban interior tactics provide outcomes that even in an exterior setting can still create moments of interiority around them as well as within them that bring together two conditions in a propositional manner as opposed to being opposites. In order to translate the narratives into conceptual design outcomes, drawing and model making will be used as the primary exploratory tools. This offers the audience different means of perception to be gauged through putting it back out into the forum it was derived from, allowing for three final outcomes that respond more accurately to how people react to open narrative as a design tool.</p>

2084: The Fantasy Compact

<p>For the last two decades, social media has increasingly dominated our day to day interactions. We have evolved into digitized creatures able to communicate on a daily basis to a broad and varied audience, comprised of people we know, people we hardly know, and people we have never met. Through images, tweets, status updates and posts, everyone has an ability to view and harness a variety of opinions, emotions, stories and ideas at a moment’s notice. It’s in those instances when a person resonates with a certain moment or place they are in, that they create a narrative through a caption or a hashtag that’s attached to an image which allows everyone who views it to read a story of someone’s experience. This digital/virtual age poses new questions for interior architecture, a practice that generally orients itself in the realm of physical, built space. It is the intent of this research to offer a new kind of design approach, more relevant to our current digitized lives, to see what it might offer for urban interior speculations. Through exploring ways of tapping into this narrative and ‘flipping the script’, we can explore a new kind of design tactic that brings forward the power that social media narratives can have on the built environment and interior strategies. The city of Los Angeles will be used as a testing grounds for narrative urban interior tactics, to see how it could offer the city whimsical and outlandish interventions that respond to the people currently interacting with certain sites in it. As a nod to George Orwell’s 1984 future speculations, this project is a counterpoint that offers an optimistic, open and free speculation tool by providing a constant dialogue between the public and designer through the forum of Instagram. This project teases out the ideas that narrative can create instinctual, intuitive and thought-provoking designs that can be spectacles, attractors, events or counterparts that open up a potential to talk about interior in a new realm, where it can contribute on larger scales like the urban setting. Urban interior tactics provide outcomes that even in an exterior setting can still create moments of interiority around them as well as within them that bring together two conditions in a propositional manner as opposed to being opposites. In order to translate the narratives into conceptual design outcomes, drawing and model making will be used as the primary exploratory tools. This offers the audience different means of perception to be gauged through putting it back out into the forum it was derived from, allowing for three final outcomes that respond more accurately to how people react to open narrative as a design tool.</p>