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S has spent the better part of the last hour injecting fentanyl. But he is not in any danger: After a brief scare, when his heart rate dropped considerably, the pulse oximeter on his left index finger now says his vital signs are nearly back to normal. The staff at OnPoint NYC, the harm reduction nonprofit whose back room is designated for precisely this purpose, are no longer worried. Instead of administering medical care, they bring him a cup of coffee and a candy bar.
Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, lead a five-day march to the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery in 1965.
In Sweden, as in many other countries, a fully cashless economy feels inevitable in the coming years. But as we have found, people who rely on cash due to poverty are left without the means to manage independently or even to pay their bills. This is not just a practical issue, but an emotional one. There is a sense of loneliness, of loss of community and human connection in the digital economy. As one of our interviewees said: “It’s not just cashlessness. I feel that human beings have disappeared. We live like robots; click here, click that. Digitisation has made people lonely.”
Some have suggested that young men are drawn to Andrew Tate because they suffer from a dearth of social contact. Yet men go to Tate not to alleviate loneliness but to intensify it.
My friend and colleague, Maureen Henderson, who has died aged 83, joined the Polytechnic of North London as a social work tutor in the 1970s. At that time it had the biggest social work department in Britain and Mo soon became an important member of it, as the principal tutor and leader of the combined childcare and family social work course.
People presenting at emergency with mental health concerns are experiencing the longest wait times in Australia for admission to a ward, according to a new report from the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine.
At least one prominent OPM has caught flak for using college email addresses — 2U. In 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company used the “.edu” email addresses of its college clients in order to recruit prospective students into their online programs. Hall noted that this is a widespread practice in the OPM industry.
I was searching for power lines, because I wanted to make sense of another kind of imbalance within the landscape of central Ohio: that between corporate control and ordinary people; between economic development and nature; and, most acutely in a season of drought, between electricity-hungry data centers and something as necessary for human survival as a field of crops. That’s what brought me to this roadside in Sunbury.
The Western District of Missouri Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a $23 million ruling against the Department of Social Services for breach of contract. The appeals court sided with EngagePoint, a technology company that sued the state in 2016 alleging it was owed millions for work it conducted but was never paid for. The company was hired to help implement the state’s software system for managing public benefits cases, including Medicaid.
Recurring dreams are a surprisingly common phenomenon: research shows that up to 75 percent of adults experience at least one during their lifetime. These dreams exist on a spectrum: sometimes they’re nearly identical each time they occur, but they may also have recurring themes, locations or characters set against different backdrops. This fluctuation sets recurring dreams apart from bad dreams triggered by post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological condition in which people relive specific memories from their waking life with far less variation while asleep.
Common descriptions include being stuck in a bubble, trapped behind a pane of glass, or viewing the world from very far away. People also describe a feeling of unfamiliarity, as if their own thoughts and memories – even their own body – belonged to someone else.
Joan Baraclough, one of the founding members of BASW, has died, just days before her 91st birthday. Joan was a well-known and respected social work leader, having held a number of roles within BASW, including being one of its first assistant general secretaries in 1971, a year after the association was created.
According to state law, California sellers can’t sell a product or service at a price point more than 10% higher than what was being charged prior to a state of emergency being declared. The law covers food, emergency supplies, medical supplies, transportation, hotels and rental housing. So, a 10% inc rfease isn’t price gouging?
Here’s the full DFCS statement:
“Hiring additional social workers and supporting staff to best serve children and families continue to be top priorities for DFCS leadership, as we and other child welfare agencies throughout the state are facing a critical shortage of qualified applicants for open social worker positions. Just recently, DFCS successfully onboarded 20 new social workers, who were all assigned to either Emergency Response or Dependency Investigations, where we have the greatest need for additional staff. DFCS is committed to recruiting additional qualified staff as quickly as possible and to partnering with staff on the development of solutions to meet the community’s need.”
It’s worth noting just how unusual this all is. The School of Social Work is unique as a U-M department that houses an art collection under its own auspices, rather than through a university-owned museum. Even aside from the most recognizable artists, the Social Work collection includes not only paintings, prints, and photographs, but quilts, conceptual pieces, and sculptures, some of them quite large. Above: Keith Haring’s Silence=Death
The lawsuit lists a litany of impacts on students and professors. A social work professor said she was threatened with being fired unless she canceled a class project in which students had decided to analyze the potential negative impacts of the new state law. A political science professor said university officials told her that her course on poverty could violate the law because of its “perceived focus on learning about systematic racism,” according to the lawsuit. Above: Alabama state flag
According to the report, HIQA inspectors were concerned about 300 children in the Dublin area, who were assessed as being at low or medium priority who were on waiting lists, and escalated these cases.
In the new year, I came to where it was truly winter, on a train that passed the sunset and went on for a while longer, until out of the dark there was my station, a red shed by the snowy tracks and the train shuddering away.
Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. She’s the oldest daughter of a mailman and sales associate at Hudson’s. She attended Detroit Public Schools, graduated from Cass Technical High School and received bachelor and master’s degrees in social work from Wayne State University.
As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was destitute; there was no money for street signs. But the Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I came to understand it as one of their great strengths. In those days, a typical Managua address might be, “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or, “From the old tree, three blocks toward the lake.” The old tree hadn’t existed for years. But everyone remembered.
We’re in classic Theory of the Leisure Class territory here, Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 bestselling critique of wealth accumulation over social good and the wasteful culture that blossomed in its wake. Melding economics with sociology, Veblen examined the way the era was being defined by the rise of the robber baron—industrialists like Rockefeller, Morgan, and Vanderbilt who took advantage of the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one to accumulate massive amounts of wealth. The supremacy of the landed class was waning, and the new moneyed class advanced a flagrantly lavish culture that almost seemed to celebrate waste and needless expense.
More than 90 percent of adults aged 65 and older take at least one prescription medication, with 66 percent of people in that age group taking more than three prescriptions a month. But many people who take daily medications are unaware that certain drugs in their pill box can also increase their risk of falling, which can lead to devastating, even fatal, complications.
Hillside homebuilding, moreover, has despoiled the natural heritage of the majority for the sake of an affluent few. Instead of protecting “significant ecological areas” as required by law, county planning commissions have historically been the malleable tools of hillside developers. Much of the beautiful coastal sage and canyon riparian ecosystems of the Santa Monica Mountains have been supplanted by castles and “guard-gate prestige.” Elsewhere in Southern California-in the Verdugo, Puente, San Jose, San Joaquin, and San Raphael Hills, as well as the Santa Susana, Santa Ana, and San Gabriel Mountains-tens of thousands of acres of oak and walnut woodland have been destroyed by bulldozers to make room for similar posh developments.
The Creative Rights in AI coalition, which includes industry groups in music, publishing, journalism, TV, cinema and photography, on Tuesday called Starmer’s position “deeply concerning” and called on ministers to continue to consider their case to keep the current copyright system.
The psychology of ostracism helps explain why you can sometimes shrug it off, yet other times feel the urge to lash out
Supporting better policies for a strong social Europe
My colleagues and I have been looking into what we call the ‘self-insight motive’ and we’ve found it might be more accurate to see it as akin to a personality trait that varies in strength between individuals – some people have more of it than others, just as some people are more extraverted or agreeable than others. We also delved into whether the self-insight motive actually pays off – whether people with a greater self-insight motive really know themselves better – and uncovered some surprising results.
Dependency disorders are present in people of all professions, but academics — who often set their own schedules and work regularly in isolation — are often good at concealing them, or might not realize that they have a problem. Moreover, the competitive environment and concerns about professional reputations, along with a fear of being fired, deter many from disclosing their illness. But some institutions are pioneering programmes to support staff.
Given Social Security’s importance, concerns about its current and future state are understandable and widespread. Some of those worries, and the many changes to the program in its eight-plus decades, have given rise to misconceptions about how it is funded and how it works. Here are the facts behind 10 of the most stubborn Social Security myths.
This group paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, according to a recent analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning tax research group. Since unauthorized workers cannot collect retirement and other Social Security benefits without a change to their immigration status, the billions they pour into the program effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries.
A decade-old scandal involving the grooming, trafficking and abuse of girls and children in England has gained renewed attention following criticism from tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Dr. Le Dinh Tung said that the school opened the social work major based on the great need for social work activities in hospitals and medical examination and treatment facilities, and the income of this major is also quite attractive.
Nurses experience deep suffering when they can’t act according to their moral compass. Our research shows a way forward
An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-riding lessons.
New research identifies differing trends in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses among adolescents and adults, including an increase among adults from 2020 to 2023. The study… found a significant downward trends in ADHD incidence among adults from 2016 to 2020 and adolescents from 2016 to 2018. The ADHD incidence rate remained stable for adolescents in subsequent years.
In 1993, sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of McDonaldisation to describe how principles like efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, derived from the fast-food industry, permeate other sectors of society. While these principles often streamline operations and increase scalability, they risk overshadowing qualitative aspects of human experience. Today, with artificial intelligence revolutionising industries at an unprecedented pace, a critical question arises: does AI represent a new form of McDonaldisation in higher education?
More than half of 23-year-olds in a European study show restrictive, emotional or uncontrolled eating behaviors, according to new research. Structural brain differences appear to play a role in the development of these eating habits.
Samuel Morton and his colleagues used average skull volume to support their theory of white supremacy.
Demographers say it will finally arrive nationwide in the fall of this year. That’s when recruiting offices will begin to confront the long-anticipated drop-off in the number of applicants from among the next class of high school seniors. But the downturn isn’t just a problem for universities and colleges. It’s a looming crisis for the economy, with fewer graduates eventually coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, even as international rivals increase the proportions of their populations with degrees.
New findings from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER(link is external)) Initiative suggest that infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may be associated with an increase in the number of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) cases.
SASW’s response to the Scottish Government’s Palliative Care for all strategy consultation
The ambition of Reform UK, a far right and racist party, is to mobilise division and hate for its advantage. Nigel Farage and the party’s other MPs never hesitate to spread their vile lies whenever they have a platform. And they are currently having success in doing so.
The finding was one of several discrepancies identified during an audit of cash payments authorised by staff at the north Dublin area office of Tusla which also revealed overpayments totalling over €6,000 were made to foster carers due to delays by social workers in notifying colleagues that placements had ended.
Both intuition and past research suggest that whether people deem someone trustworthy depends on that person’s past behavior and reputation for betrayal. In a series of experiments, psychologists found that subjects regarded those who previously exhibited that behavior as less trustworthy. However, when the betrayal benefited them or had no effect on them, participants regarded the betrayer as trustworthy. This pattern was largely consistent across the types of relationships studied: friendships, romantic relationships and professional relationships.
In the U.S., recent reports estimate that 5.9% of youth and 4.5% of adults currently vape. This proportion varies worldwide, however. In Britain, an estimated 7.8% of youth and 11% of adults vape. Vaping nicotine is addictive, and more and more research is being done to find out how best to quit. On Jan. 8, 2025, a team of specialists on tobacco use and health policy published a report that draws together the available scientific evidence on how best to support people to quit vaping nicotine.
Policy analysts and Democratic lawmakers raised alarm over the weekend at a leaked document indicating that House Republicans intend to pursue massive cuts to Medicaid, a program that provides sometimes lifesaving coverage to roughly 80 million people across the United States…. The document, which reportedly comes from the House Budget Committee, suggests the reform would result in up to $918 billion in cuts over a 10-year period.
The logo for the Department of Government Efficiency as of November 14, 2024
Over the past five years, California has become a poster child for what climate-fueled weather disasters can do to a state’s home insurance market. Following a rash of historic wildfires in 2017 and 2018, insurance companies have fled the state, dropped tens of thousands of customers in flammable areas, and raised prices by double-digit percentages.
Professor of Social Work Cindy Sousa
“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”