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Imagine you’re a child in a classroom, and your teacher tells everyone to form groups for a project. You sit and wait, watching as other kids pair up and wondering if anyone will pick you. This fear of rejection — familiar to many children and adults — can significantly impact how kids behave in their peer groups, according to new research from the University of Georgia.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection. Above: Oxford undergraduates on a late night drinking spree, 1824.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that all women worldwide have experienced some form of domestic violence in their lifetime. In the United States, 3 in 10 women (29 percent) and 1 in 10 men (10 percent) report enduring rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by a partner, with significant effects on their wellbeing.

The cross-party Work and Pensions Committee has today launched its new inquiry on the Government’s welfare reform proposals, Pathways to Work

The results show that greater exposure to air pollution from birth to three years old is associated with lower connectivity between the amygdala and the cortical networks involved in attention, somatomotor function — which coordinates body movements — and auditory function. Additionally, higher exposure to PM10 particles in the year before the neuroimaging assessment was associated with lower functional connectivity between the salience and medial-parietal networks, which are responsible for detecting stimuli in the environment and for introspection and self-perception.

Research estimates that one-third or more of the unhoused population in the U.S. is age 50 or older. Unhoused people of all ages face high rates of chronic and serious illness. They also die at younger ages compared with people who are not unhoused. Yet, there are few options for palliative and end-of-life care for unhoused people.

To get a sense of what it’s like to work in the profession, we’re highlighting two Mandel School students to find out what a typical day is like for them.

Alcohol was recorded as a feature in 53pc of all calls received in 2023 ahead of cocaine (21pc), cannabis (12pc), opioids (11pc) and benzodiazepines (8pc). In contrast, alcohol was only mentioned in 16pc of calls in 2009 with cocaine referenced in only 2pc of total contacts that year.

Now here we are, with a ’Labour’ government extolling exactly the same politics, but with a veil of respectable statesmanship. Still the fur coat, still no knickers. Still deliberately driving people over the edge in an unspoken process of enforced counterproductive Darwinism. You are economically active, or you don’t matter. Except it’s 2025; humans are supposed to evolve, not devolve. Let’s institute mandatory psychological testing for predatory psychiatric conditions before people can take up positions of power in the public sector.

A new analysis of a vaccination program in Wales found that the shingles vaccine appeared to lower new dementia diagnoses by 20% — more than any other known intervention.

Each person lives a personal history of love. Typically, this involves things like middle-school crushes, high-school couples, college hook-ups, beautiful moments, bad breakups, unforgettable dates, dates you’d rather forget, reliable partners, unreliable jerks, leaps of trust, insipid marriages, pains of betrayal, love into old age, and so on. Of course, no single history looks the same. But a reasonable hope is that, as we gain experience as lovers, we figure out what works for us and what doesn’t. Ideally, a person reflects on the reasons they have for loving certain persons and not others, and this reflection allows for the discovery of a deeper, more valuable love. Ideally, love gains wisdom.

In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis.

I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI—papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.

Latest workforce figures from the Department for Education (DfE) show 23 per cent of the workforce was either a first-line, middle or senior manager last year. That compares to 20.2 per cent in 2023 and 19.8 per cent in 2017.

Without downplaying the dangers of authoritarian leaders, studies from my research group and other labs from across the globe identify an equally serious threat to democracy: “authoritarian followers” who instinctively comply with a dictator. We need to understand this personality type so that we can find ways to encourage authoritarian followers to support democracy instead.

In separate letters, Corby set out the consequences of the issue to Phillipson and Streeting: “Every stakeholder that we met with for our 2023-24 performance review, and most stakeholders that provided us with written feedback, raised their concerns about this issue. “For registrants, fitness to practise delays can have a significant impact on their wellbeing and cause financial hardship. For people raising concerns with Social Work England, these delays can mean they are waiting years for a resolution to their concern, which can be particularly difficult where the alleged conduct has had a significant impact on their life.”

Loneliness and isolation are indeed social problems that warrant serious attention, especially since chronic states of loneliness are linked with poor outcomes such as depression and a shortened lifespan. But there is another side to this story, one that deserves a closer look. For some people, the shift toward aloneness represents a desire for what researchers call “positive solitude,” a state that is associated with well-being, not loneliness.

Belonging. A simple word with a simple meaning, to feel comfortable in a space. Valery Bonifacio-Garcia, a graduating senior from the Dominican Republic, decided to attend WKU because of belonging.

And, according to his FBI record, the militant civil rights leader Malcolm X was a “pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenic”: a diagnosis made based on his activism and protest speech. As Jonathan Metzl has shown, the descriptors used to “diagnose” Malcolm X were later enshrined in the American Psychiatric Association’s 1968 updated definition of schizophrenia. Dissent in the US was as potentially pathological as dissent anywhere else.

We write this in the wake of the illegal arrests of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, Alireza Doroudi, and other foreign students and teaching faculty at American universities. We will call these arrests what they are: abductions by ICE cowards in plainclothes and facemasks.

People living with Long COVID often feel dismissed, disbelieved and unsupported by their healthcare providers, according to a new study.

In 2019, Christina Matz, an Associate Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work, formed a partnership with the Spier Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the well-being of the communities in which we work and live.

The Albanese Government and the Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children (IDAC) will partner to build supply and capacity of integrated early years services. The Albanese Government will provide up to $50 million through the Build Early Education Fund, toward co-investment opportunities to help build or expand integrated and holistic early learning services in areas of need.

Another plaintiff, Dr. Katie Edwards, had six grants canceled since February, the lawsuit says. Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, has focused on research about preventing sexual violence in minority communities, including among Indigenous youth and LGBTQ+ communities.

Ginny Keil, who worked as a licensed clinical social worker and earned her master’s degree in social work from Rutgers at age 52, said she first heard about the audit program through a choir friend. She enrolled in 2016, taking a few courses. Her husband soon followed.

Purple flags representing the 291 county residents who died of opioid overdose in 2023 are displayed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day last August.

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.

Nearly half of people who are affected by ketamine use disorder are not seeking any support or treatment, according to a new study led by the University of Exeter and University College London (UCL)