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Embarking on Recovery: When Does Stigma End? Investigating the Experiences of Discrimination and How These Affect Aspirations in Recovery From Substance Misuse

Leave a Comment / Anxiety and Addiction, Anxiety and Discrimination, Anxiety Research, Anxiety Resources, News /

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Background: Research into the impact of stigma and discrimination occurring while in treatment and recovery from substance abuse has reported that participants experience discrimination in areas such as employment, housing, and health care. Further research has suggested that there is increased anticipation of discrimination in these areas. Studies reported that fear of discrimination can impact on an individual’s willingness to disclose information about their addiction and recovery. Aim: The aim of the study is to fill a gap within current knowledge by exploring how experiences of stigma and discrimination impact on individuals’ aspirations in recovery from substance abuse. Method: A purposive sample of seven participants were recruited to take part in semistructured interviews, from which data were recorded for analysis using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings: Three superordinate and 10 subordinate themes were highlighted through analysis: “Forever an Addict,” “The Broken Social Contract,” and “A New Social Identity.” Conclusion: The findings of the study raise issues in the current approach to supporting those in recovery and suggest that there is a need for increased awareness and education at various levels in society.

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Associations Between Existential Concerns and Adverse Experiences: A Systematic Review

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Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Exposure to traumatic events or adverse experiences and its consequences have been studied mainly from a posttraumatic stress disorder perspective. Existential psychotherapy focuses on universal human concerns and the anxiety that occurs when a person confronts the conflicts inherent in life and toward death, which include the experience of difficult situations. A systematic review was performed including 56 papers that studied the relations between adverse experiences and existential concerns. The articles were assessed and described in relation to existential domains, type of adverse experience, posttraumatic responses, and existential psychological interventions. Existential concerns appeared in different degrees and categories in studied samples. Outcomes suggest that from an existential psychotherapy perspective, reactions to traumatic events can be both negative and positive for a person. In addition, the pass of time turned out to be an important factor, especially in finding meaning from traumatic experiences, the reduction of negative symptoms, and the achieving of posttraumatic growth. Existential-related interventions described in this review showed positive outcomes, suggesting that it is an effective trauma treatment approach.

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Future Time Perspective as an Operationalization of Existential Concerns Related to Time

Leave a Comment / Anxiety Research, Death Anxiety, Fear of Death, Fear Research, News, Psychotherapy Research /

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Psychologists and other clinical therapists often focus on the psychological processes that result from the fact that human beings will one day die, not death anxiety/afterlife anxiety itself. Nevertheless, existential concerns are death concerns, and any anxiety associated with death should be understood through that lens—as resulting from concerns about death. Understanding how one views the amount of time left to live, and how this perception influences motives, goal cognitions, mood, and well-being, is of great importance from a humanistic–existential perspective. Socioemotional selectivity theory and the concept of future time perspective (FTP) capture these phenomena and have the potential to operationalize perspectives of time constraints within existential psychology. The present work attempts to show how FTP may be used to operationalize the problem of time from an existential perspective, specifically targeting the existential themes of death, meaning, isolation, and freedom. Clinical implications of considering FTP as an existential construct are discussed, as are limitations and future directions.

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Existential Meaninglessness Scale: Scale Development and Psychometric Properties

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Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Ahead of Print. Grounded in a tripartite existential meaninglessness model, the authors developed the 18-item Existential Meaninglessness Scale (EMS) to assess one’s concern and anxiety of existential meaninglessness. Across three samples, the EMS’s factor structure and evidence of convergent, criterion-related, and incremental validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability were examined. Exploratory factor analyses demonstrated three dimensions of the EMS: incomprehension, purposelessness, and insignificance. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that a bifactor model was a better fit to the data than other models. The bifactor model provided evidence for a general factor and measurement invariance. Ancillary bifactor indices indicated EMS’s unidimensionality. Findings of bivariate correlations and hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence for different aspects of construct validity and internal consistency. Both the Concern and Anxiety measures of the EMS positively predicted depressive symptoms and suicide ideation above and beyond the effects of general existential meaninglessness, general feelings of anxiety, and presence of meaning in life. Based on the findings, the authors discuss future research directions on existential meaninglessness using the EMS.

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Social media use and adolescents’ well-being: A note on flourishing

Leave a Comment / Anxiety in Young People / Adolescents, Anxiety Research, Communication Research, Depression Research, Happiness Research, internet / digital living, News, research, Social Anxiety Research, Technology and Anxiety /

BackgroundSeveral large-scale studies and reviews have reported both negative and positive associations of social media use with well-being, suggesting that the findings are more complex and need more nuanced study. Moreover, there is little or no exploration of how social media use in adolescence influences flourishing, a more all-encompassing construct beyond well-being, including six sub-domains (i.e., happiness, meaning and purpose, physical and mental health, character, close social relationships, and financial stability). This paper aims to fill this gap by understanding how adolescents might flourish through social media activities by fulfilling the basic needs pointed out by the Self-Determination Theory, i.e., relatedness, autonomy, and competence.MethodsThe study is drawn on cross-sectional data collected from 1,429 Swiss adolescents (58.8% females, Mage = 15.84, SDage = 0.83) as part of the HappyB project in Spring 2022. Self-reported measures included the Harvard Adolescent Flourishing scale, positive and negative online social experiences, self-disclosure on social media, and social media inspiration. Control variables included, among others, self-esteem, ill-being, and personality.ResultsAfter applying Bonferroni’s correction, results of the hierarchical regression analyses showed that positive social media experiences (β = 0.112, p 

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Lethal and severe violence: Characterizing Swedish female offenders with and without a severe mental disorder [SMD]

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… All females charged with lethal or attempted lethal violence, who had undergone forensic psychiatric investigations (FPI) in Sweden between 2000 and 2014, constituting the two groups SMD (n = 84) and no SMD (n = 91), were included. … … Overall, both groups were often unemployed, previously victimized within close relations, had psychiatric health issues, and more than

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Therapist perceptions of the implementation of a new screening procedure using the ItFits-toolkit in an iCBT routine care clinic: A mixed-methods study using the consolidated framework for implementation research

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… This study investigates the implementation of a new, more automated screening procedure using the ItFits-toolkit in the online clinic, Internet Psychiatry (iPsych) (www.internetpsykiatrien.dk), delivering guided iCBT for mild to moderate anxiety and depressive disorders. The study focuses on how the therapists experienced the process. … … The therapists experienced an improvement in the intake

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Two years COVID-19 pandemic: Development of university students’ mental health 2020–2022

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… A cross-sectional, anonymous online survey among students of six universities was conducted between April and May 2022 (N = 5,510). … …More than one third of students exhibited clinically relevant symptoms of depression (35.5%), hazardous alcohol use (33.0–35.5% depending on gender) or anxiety disorder (31.1%). Taken together, almost two out of three (61.4%) students

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