Archive for June 2024

NAPE president Jerry Earle says social work vacancies in Newfoundland and Labrador are a crisis that is getting worse. CSSD had 99 vacancies almost a year ago, but that number has grown to 105

It has been 41 years since the Mental Health Act (1983) was passed and became the main piece of legislation that covers the assessment, treatment, and rights of people with a mental health disorder in England and Wales. Much has changed in 41 years, including attitudes and understanding towards people who live with mental illness. A new Mental Health Act to bring such important legislation up to date must be a priority for the next government.

Women diagnosed with perinatal depression are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease in the following 20 years compared to women who have given birth without experiencing perinatal depression. The study is the first of its kind to look at cardiovascular health after perinatal depression and included data on around 600,000 women. It found the strongest links with risks of high blood pressure, ischemic heart disease and heart failure.

A clinical trial by Macquarie University’s Spinal Pain Research Group has looked at whether walking could be an effective, cost-effective and accessible intervention. The trial followed 701 adults who had recently recovered from an episode of low back pain, randomly allocating participants to either an individualised walking program and six physiotherapist-guided education sessions over six months, or to a control group.

Linda Tirado is a fine writer. And as a result of police brutality against journalists, she is now dying in her early forties. It started when Tirado covered a George Floyd protest in Minneapolis in 2020. She was shot in the face with a rubber bullet by a police officer. While rubber bullets, law enforcement assures us, are nonlethal, the force of a shot can fracture skulls. Tirado lost her sight in one eye, and over the last few years the full extent of her injury became clear. She also had brain damage and it was getting worse. And now, as her recent co-authored Substack informs us, “she is dying. Slowly, painfully, and with none of the dignity she’s earned and all of the TBI-induced dementia that’s stealing her limited time left with her kids.”

She’s still with us, however. So we wanted to take this chance to honor her, as she has honored others.

Florida’s law, perhaps the nation’s most far-reaching if it does take effect, says the state considers it discriminatory “to subject any student or employee to training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates or compels” them “to believe any of the following concepts.” It then lists eight taboo ideas. Among them: the idea that a person “should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity or inclusion” and that a person’s status as privileged or oppressed “is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, sex or national origin.”