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It’s well-known that family caregiving for sick or elderly adults can bring on stress, anxiety and depression. It can also turn you into someone you don’t even recognize. Caregivers say it scrambles old habits and patterns, rearranges intimate relationships, and forces you to confront your limits. It can excavate and reorganize the soul, what one caregiver calls mind and body fracking.
Age-related brain diseases such as stroke, dementia, and late-life depression are a debilitating part of growing older, but people can lower their risk of these diseases through behavioral and lifestyle changes. In a new extensive systematic review, Mass General Brigham researchers identified 17 modifiable risk factors that are shared by stroke, dementia, and late-life depression. Modifying any one of them can reduce your risk of all three conditions.
An English phrase seems particularly apt here: Is this entire CPD system ‘fit for purpose’?
Professor Geraldine Macdonald’s research at the University of Bristol focuses on developing robust evidence for interventions social care policy and practice. A registered social worker, Professor Macdonald has been a long-standing advocate of the importance of rigorous research in social care and specialises in the evaluation of complex social interventions.
A paper led by academics at Northumbria University… points to figures outlining the scale of the challenges and increasing numbers of people impacted:
– Approximately 1.25 million people in the UK have an eating disorder
– 12.5% of 17 to 19-year-olds in England reported having an eating disorder in 2023, compared with 0.8% in 2017
– The financial cost of eating disorders to the English economy was estimated as £8 billion in 2020
Despite this growing demand, many communities face a severe shortage of mental health professionals such as psychologists, counselors, therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists, among others. To assess where these shortages are most acute, Addiction-Rep—a consulting firm for rehab and addiction treatment centers—analyzed data from multiple federal sources, measuring the number of mental health professionals per 10,000 residents in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas and all 50 states. The findings highlight significant disparities in mental health workforce availability, particularly in the South and pockets of the Mountain West.
As director of The Camden Life Center in Camden, New York, Jessica Perusse, LCSW-R, CSSW, has several ties to the students and faculty in the School of Social Work in the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. Above: Jessica (center, with plaque)
With low overhead, abysmal wages, and largely nonperishable inventory, dollar store chains can easily be located nearly anywhere, including in small communities. Dollar chains are especially concentrated across the US South. In Louisiana alone, there are two dollar stores for every 10,000 people and almost half of those stores are in counties with fewer than 100 people per square mile. Their ubiquity has made dollar stores a Southern staple that is often the only choice for communities’ basic needs. While these stores continue to make money for shareholders, workers face a relentless grind of poverty wages, unsafe working conditions, and corporate-driven understaffing that puts safety at risk.
“This bill eliminates tenure,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. “If certain administrators can call for post-tenure review at any time and fire a faculty member without due process, that is not real tenure, that is tenure in name only.”
BASW International Chair, Janet Walker considers social work’s important role in an increasingly unstable world.
Scottish Care says care packages which are 15 minutes in length, never mind five-minutes, are undignified and untenable. CEO of Scottish Care Donald Macaskill said social care is about relationships, not tasks, and people receiving care in their home deserve to be treated with dignity: “The growing use of five-minute visits to support some of our most valuable citizens is quite frankly obscene.
The day I learned my great-grandfather was a killer, certain aspects of my own life became clear to me, snapping into focus with an almost audible click. I grew up hearing that my great-grandfather had been a powerful man who was equal parts obstinate, harsh and unlikeable. But until that day, I had no idea he had also been capable of maiming and killing thousands of people without remorse. As horrific as that realisation was, it was also revelatory. It led me to reflect on the power of addiction and the toxicity of family secrets, what counts as poison and what counts as elixir, and whether and how redemption is possible, and for whom.
Good news for worms: Researchers have found a treatment that extends roundworms’ lives by up to a factor of ten. They’ve also learned how to give mice an extra 50 percent of healthy longevity. And a healthy-life-extending treatment is now being tested on dogs whose owners are eager to keep their beloved pets around as long as possible. But what about us? Can medical science help more people—perhaps even most—live past 90 and longer in good health?
LB706, introduced by Omaha Sen. Terrell McKinney, would require emergency dispatchers to screen incoming calls for signs of mental health-related issues, such as threatening self-harm or severe distress. Under the bill, if mental health concerns are present, the dispatcher would flag the call as a “mental health priority,” prompting dispatch of an APS social worker alongside an officer.
Dr. Barbra Teater leads a panel on different career choices for social workers.
Powerful lobbying has quietly exempted finance from an EU sustainability law, risking Europe’s environmental and human rights commitments.
Under the legislation, New Jersey would join an interstate agreement, known as the Social Work Licensure Compact, that would allow social workers licensed at the clinical and master’s levels here to practice in other states that are also members of the compact without obtaining multiple state licenses.
The new legislation essentially limits how much judges can reduce a prison sentence for mitigating factors (such as a guilty plea, young age or mental ability). A regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Justice estimated it would result in 1,350 more people in prison. This and other law changes are effectively putting more people in prison for longer. By 2035, imprisonment numbers are expected to increase by 40% from their current levels, with significant cost implications.
Long believed to be particularly associated with males, new research is revolutionising our understanding of autism
“I can imagine the criticism we would receive if we had information about a very dangerous situation, potentially dangerous situation, that a child was about to be born into, and we said we should do nothing until that child is born,” Chris Winters, the department’s commissioner, said at the meeting.
The AMHP Leads Network, representing the Approved Mental Health Professionals of England and Wales has criticised the change, a position supported by the British Association of Social Workers. AMHP Leads Network Co-Chair Kirsten Bingham expressed grave concerns:
‘The proposal is deeply troubling and will have disastrous unintended consequences for both individuals in crisis and those responding to mental health emergencies. As the key decision maker under the Mental Health Act 1983, we strongly urge the House of Commons, to reject this amendment.
Lately, there have been many headlines on scientific fraud and journal article retractions. If this trend continues, it represents a serious threat to public trust in science. One way to tackle this problem – and ensure public trust in science remains high – may be to slow it down. We sometimes refer to this philosophy as slow science. Akin to the slow food movement, slow science prioritises quality over speed and seeks to buck incentive structures that promote mass production.
But Chua Hoi-wai, chief executive of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service and veteran policy advocate behind the setting up of the poverty commission, conceded that influencing the government had become more challenging, pointing to a paradigm shift in governance culture.
Michaela Raj, manager of the Emotional Wellbeing Team at Wakefield Council, reflects on winning the Children and Young People’s Champion category at the CYP Now Awards 2024.
If experience is a song, mood is the bassline. As your thoughts and sensations flow by, it’s your mood that provides the emotional undercurrent. It predisposes you to respond in certain ways to a dynamic and changing world. If you’re in a positive mood, a beautiful sunset pulses with awe and appreciation; a first sip of coffee hums with comfort amid the morning’s busy schedule. Conversely, if you’re in a bad mood, forgetting your wallet while shopping immediately introduces sharp notes of gloom and irritation.
Peer review as we know it arose in the mid 20th century as the demand for specialised research grew following the end of the second world war. Contrast this with the 18th and 19th centuries, when peer review was undertaken mainly by editors of learned societies and university publishing presses. Today, peer review is done largely by external peer reviewers who have been asked by a journal’s editor to conduct a review of a manuscript focusing on the quality and value of the research.
Members of the Crisis Response Team, which has police officers and social workers, who have expertise in mental health and de-escalation techniques, deployed together to respond to mental health and substance abuse issues within the city.
When a Veteran who has bravely served our country is without a home, there’s another kind of army standing by to help. Our team of social workers connects Veterans with the resources and support they earned through their service, putting them back on the path to housing and independence.
Since her teens, Anna Beecher used drinking as a gateway to sexual encounters, a mask for both her vulnerability and accountability. It took falling for someone in the sober light of day to realise what love was
Crashes on electric scooters are mostly due to the behavior of the riders, with one-handed steering and riding in a group being some of the largest risk factors. The researchers are also concerned about riders who deliberately crash or cause dangerous situations when riding, a phenomenon that seems to be specific to electric scooters.
The work has been grueling even as it has freed her; it is constant crisis, and it is easy to lose herself and disconnect from her body and her own needs. But the community she has built as an organizer is one that can hold her too when she needs it, a place where she has friends and care beyond her immediate family. A home.
He found that students who work more than 20 hours a week do significantly worse on tests and come to class less often; half of those low-attending students ended up failing his class, compared to just 7% of high-attending students.
The new political review centers on Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) announcements seeking applications for everything from investigator-initiated research to specific research topics and training grants…. NIH only published three NOFOs between 20 January and 26 March, compared with 163 in 2023 and 147 in 2024 between the same dates. A document seen by Science from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says 27 out of the 41 NOFOs for grants it intended to award in the 2026 fiscal year remain unpublished.
Red Scare author Clay Risen sees parallels between 1950s witch-hunts and the right’s assault on government today
Jacintah McCaffrey’s nearly 25-year career in social work in Northern Ireland began in 2001 with her first role at a children’s residential home.
Labour’s Kim Leadbeater (above) has promised to work with fellow MPs to amend her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to ensure practitioners other than health professionals are allowed not to participate. While social workers were originally not part of the bill’s process for assisted dying, they have been added to it through amendments made by Leadbeater during its recently-concluded committee stage.
After a rocky start, François Bayrou held onto his position as prime minister in February by making France a promise. Trade unions and business lobbies, he said, would be able to hold a series of negotiations to hash out possible amendments to President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial 2023 reform to France’s retirement system. Adopted without a parliamentary vote, Macron’s pension law extracted savings solely on the backs of late-career workers, increasing the retirement age for public pensions from sixty-two to sixty-four while safeguarding employers and wealthy retirees from new charges.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Lori VanWinkle, R-Minot, who said people should have the right to seek treatments that affirm their religious beliefs about sexuality or gender. She previously told lawmakers that she is concerned most counseling is now LGBTQ-affirming and therefore would not be helpful for someone with anti-LGBTQ beliefs. “To prohibit counseling that aligns with traditional or biblical viewpoints is religious discrimination,” she said.
There have been points in history when it was the U.S. that graciously welcomed talented individuals displaced by intolerant, anti-intellectual, or dangerous regimes, and reaped the social, technological and economic rewards. I do not think it hyperbolic to say that this flow is now in the throes of reversal. An investment on this front made by Canada today will be a signal heard around the world and pay off richly in the years and decades to come.
When a person dies, clinicians often look at the cause of death to determine whether it could have been avoided, either by medical prevention such as vaccines or by treatments like antibiotics. These types of deaths are known as avoidable mortalities, and in most high-income countries around the world, the number is going down.
I had just turned thirty and was doing what one does after a big birthday: lamenting my failures. My life felt like a solid C+ and to make it worse I started obsessively stalking old friends’ Facebook pages, finding nothing but achievements and milestones. I’d been hoping for failures and tribulations, for any excuse I could find to grade my life on a curve.
Claire Goodman is a Professor of Health and Care Research at the University of Hertfordshire who, for the last 20 years, has been leading research that looks at older people, mainly living either in their own homes or in care homes, and living and dying in either of those places.
Dipak Sargar in action at the Khelo India Para Games 2025 in New Delhi.
“You are killing my mum to bomb someone’s son”
Systematic reviews of interventions to prevent or reduce violence against women and girls find that sufficient investment into the right programs can address the core drivers of violence and lead to a significant reduction and prevention of violence. The reviews identify that most successful interventions do not typically separate out prevention from early intervention and response. They focus on gender dynamics, power and control, and locally relevant social structures that disempower women and girls.
Social work in hospitals plays a particularly important role in creating a harmonious relationship between the spirit and body of the patient, between the patient and medical staff and between the patient and the community. This is also a necessary factor to increase the satisfaction of the patient and the patient’s family when coming to the hospital for treatment.
A fake website meant to look like a CDC webpage was put up sometime this month and quickly taken offline, but not before diligent information manipulation researchers noticed several signs that it was likely connected to Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The site falsely suggested a link between vaccines and autism, using “testimonial” videos made by CHD and long-debunked scientific disinformation. While the site has been taken down, the question remains: what, exactly, was the plan here?
The administration’s research funding and DEI cuts present an existential threat to regional public universities like Southern Illinois University, the economic backbone of the conservative rural region it serves. Above: Students walk across the campus of SIU in Carbondale.
These statistics can be found in the latest Administration for Children’s Services prescribing reports, offering rare insight into a long-running national public health concern: the frequent and sometimes haphazard prescribing of psychotropic drugs to foster youth. Federal authorities have warned about the health dangers for more than a dozen years.
Musa al-Gharbi writes that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools about Middle East policy is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what Columbia does is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism”.
