All day Friday and all day Saturday exploring Berlin.  Then on Saturday evening we went to a reasonable restaurant and this morning - Sunday - I woke with what seems to be a pretty good dose of food poisoning.  Humph.  Well it's been a peaceful day for me with my system gradually recovering.  Dear Catero has had a tourist time on her own, popping in now and again to see how I'm doing.  Gradually and steadily getting better is the answer.  By late morning I was up for reading again.  The book I have with me isn't as appealing as I'd hoped (rather jaundiced "realism"), so I've been enjoying looking at some research papers on self-affirmation!  Sad or what?! 

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be."  They report four studies showing how widely this motivation acts - with political power, public funding, gender demographics, and in attacks on those who are trying to work for change.  There's relevance here to the second paper by Wilper et al on "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" estimating that, even after adjusting for income, education, health status, weight, exercise, smoking and alcohol use, lack of insurance was associated with about 45,000 excess deaths annually in the United States among people aged 18 to 64.  Still in the area of inequality and discrimination, Wexler et al publish on

This set of five papers documents, in part, our mixed viewpoints on depression.  Worryingly, Mehta & colleagues show deteriorating public attitudes towards mental illness in England (and to a lesser extent Scotland) between 1994 and 2003.  Meanwhile Blumner et al demonstrate a shift towards a more biological view on causes and treatment of depression in the US between 1996 and 2006.

In contrast, Miranda et al's editorial (and Grote et al's research) highlight the growing evidence showing psychotherapies for depression can be "very effective for low-income and minority populations in the United States and abroad" - extending their validity well beyond more privileged groups in developed countries.  Andersson too discusses a further way to make psychotherapies more widely available and helpful - in this case, the increasing literature documenting the widespread value of delivering cognitive behavioural therapy via the internet.     

Hodge, D. R. (2008).