Medium as message: Making an 'emancipating' film on mental health and distress

This article will be a reflective report, made by participants, facilitators and tutors on the first stage of a project entitled ‘Mentalentity’ which, had as it brief, the promotion of positive attitudes to mental health among men in rural areas. The arts ‘product’ is a 25 minute film made by a group of men in South Armagh using an action learning and action research approach.. The project is a paradigm of ‘action research’ using arts based methods also in that none of the men had ever been involved in filmmaking and had to learn a wide range of skills to convert the knowledge they were reflecting on into an arts product; avoiding the sensationalising of a very complex subject and, equally, the earnestness sometimes associated with ‘awareness raising’ projects. The project is funded by a statutory agency, the Southern Investing for Health Partnership, and is being implemented by two voluntary groups, Men Aware (South Armagh) and a pan-disability group, Out and About, working with Queen’s University, School of Education, Open Learning Programme, which facilitated and accredited the project and the Nerve Centre, an internationally renowned independent arts organisation which specialises in music, multimedia, and the moving image. The article will relate the project to a range of arts based projects undertaken by the contributors and will contextualize this work within the research in such fields as inclusive participative and emancipatory research, qualitative research methodologies, active learning pedagogy, arts based pedagogy, Social/ Relational model disability and cutting edge ‘psychosocial’ models in mental health.

Do changes in illness perceptions predict changes in psychological distress among oesophageal cancer survivors?

This study aimed to examine whether changes in the illness perceptions of oesophageal cancer survivors explain changes in their levels of psychological distress relative to demographic and biomedical variables and coping strategies. Oesophageal cancer survivors completed the Illness Perception Questionnaire — Revised, the Cancer Coping Questionnaire and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale at two points in time, 12 months apart. Cluster analysis was used to identify groups of respondents who reported a similar profile of change in their illness perception scores over time. Findings suggested that enhancing control cognitions and encouraging a positive focus coping strategy may be important in improving psychological health.

Elucidating the molecular physiopathology of acute respiratory distress syndrome in severe acute respiratory syndrome patients

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a severe form of acute lung injury. It is a response to various diseases of variable etiology, including SARS-CoV infection. To date, a comprehensive study of the genomic physiopathology of ARDS (and SARS) is lacking, primarily due to the difficulty of finding suitable materials to study the disease process at a tissue level (instead of blood, sputa or swaps). Hereby we attempt to provide such study by analyzing autopsy lung samples from patient who died of SARS and showed different degrees of severity of the pulmonary involvement. We performed real-time quantitative PCR analysis of 107 genes with functional roles in inflammation, coagulation, fibrosis and apoptosis: some key genes were confirmed at a protein expression level by immunohistochemistry and correlated to the degree of morphological severity present in the individual samples analyzed. Significant expression levels were identified for ANPEP (a receptor for CoV), as well as inhibition of the STAT1 pathway, IFNs production and CXCL10 (a T-cell recruiter). Other genes unassociated to date with ARDS/SARS include C1Qb, C5R1, CASP3, CASP9, CD14, CD68, FGF7, HLA-DRA, ICF1, IRF3, MALAT-1, MSR1, NFIL3, SLPI, USP33, CLC, GBP1 and TACI. As a result, we proposed to therapeutically target some of these genes with compounds such as ANPEP inhibitors, SLPI and dexamethasone. Ultimately, this study may serve as a model for future, tissue-based analyses of fibroinflammatory conditions affecting the lung. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.