Promoting health and well-being in social work education

This book contains contributions from social work educators from Australia, America, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. They reflect on how best to prepare students to put health and well-being to the forefront of practice, drawing on research on quality of life, subjective well-being, student well-being, community participation and social connectedness, religion and spirituality, mindful practices, trauma and health inequalities.

Graduate students lend their voices : reflections on the 10th seminar in health and environmental education research

Graduate students were invited by their faculty advisors to attend the 10
th Seminar in Health and Environmental Education Research. Afterward, they were encouraged to comment on their experiences, involvement, and positioning. Two main authors developed survey questions and retrieved, analyzed, and synthesized the responses of four other graduate students. The overall experience of attending an invitational research seminar evoked various ideas about graduate students’ present and future roles in research communities.

Cause and effect in studies on unemployment, mental health and suicide: a meta-analytic and conceptual review

Background There are ongoing questions about whether unemployment has causal effects on suicide as this relationship may be confounded by past experiences of mental illness. The present review quantified the effects of adjustment for mental health on the relationship between unemployment and suicide. Findings were used to develop and interpret likely causal models of unemployment, mental health and suicide. Method A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted on five population-based cohort studies where temporal relationships could be clearly ascertained. Results Results of the meta-analysis showed that unemployment was associated with a significantly higher relative risk (RR) of suicide before adjustment for prior mental health [RR 1.58, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.33–1.83]. After controlling for mental health, the RR of suicide following unemployment was reduced by approximately 37% (RR 1.15, 95% CI 1.00–1.30). Greater exposure to unemployment was associated with higher RR of suicide, and the pooled RR was higher for males than for females. Conclusions Plausible interpretations of likely pathways between unemployment and suicide are complex and difficult to validate given the poor delineation of associations over time and analytic rationale for confounder adjustment evident in the revised literature. Future research would be strengthened by explicit articulation of temporal relationships and causal assumptions. This would be complemented by longitudinal study designs suitable to assess potential confounders, mediators and effect modifiers influencing the relationship between unemployment and suicide.

Risk, resistance and the neoliberal agenda: young people, health and well-being in the UK, Canada and Australia

In this article we describe how concepts of risk are both generated by and used to reinforce a neoliberal agenda in relation to the health and well-being of young people. We examine how risk may be used as a tool to advance ideals such as rational choice and individual responsibility, and how this can further disadvantage young people living within the contexts of structural disadvantage (such as geographic areas of long-term unemployment; communities that experience racial discrimination). We also identify the ways in which risk is applied in uneven ways within structurally disadvantaged contexts. To suggest a way forward, we articulate a set of principles and strategies that offer up a means of resisting neoliberal imperatives and suggest how these might play out at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels. To do this, we discuss examples from the UK, Canadian and Australian contexts to illustrate how young people resist being labelled as risky, and how it is possible to engage in health equity-enhancing actions, despite seemingly deterministic forces. The cases we describe reveal some of the vulnerabilities (and hence opportunities) within the seemingly impenetrable world view and powers of neoliberals, and point towards the potential to formulate an agenda of resistance and new directions for young people's health promotion.

Just call me dad: health and social benefits to fathers and their children

In the past 20 years, social change and expectations for both maternal and paternal responsibilities have highlighted the need for services for families to better understand the role of a father in family relationships. In Australia, as well as internationally, there have been many contested understandings about what constitutes ‘good fathering’ in research, social media and in the political sphere. More specifically, there has also been an emerging trend to understand the challenging task of recruiting and maintaining men's involvement in child and family services programmes, particularly those fathers who are deemed a risk to children and mothers, violent or have been separated from their children. That many child and family/welfare services have exercised dedicated effort to work with fathers is still a relatively recent phenomenon, and has only emerged following criticism that services have been too geared towards working only with mothers. Despite this increasing interest, there is still ongoing need for more research to be undertaken in Australia. An important area of focus is the views of professionals about their perception and engagement of fathers, particularly the views of fathers who are described as being absent from family-based services. The purpose of this article is to report briefly on a study undertaken to examine how child and family welfare workers engage fathers in their work. First, this paper will describe some of the social and health benefits to fathers and their children, focusing on the key role of attachment through play. Research into effective service delivery involving fathers will then be presented, concluding with key practice factors necessary for fathers to be involved in family life.

Health and disability : partnerships in action

Matthew is a 15-year-old adolescent boy who lives with his parents, Boon Hock and Guek, and brother Benjamin in Melaka Malaysia. Matthew loves exercising in the park, going to school and dressing smartly like his brother. Matthew has an intellectual disability and autism, and attends a special school. In this story, Matthew's parents reflect on the time around the diagnoses of his disabilities, and their experiences with health care professionals. They describe the changes in Matthew as he has grown from child to adolescent. The impact of Matthew's developmental disabilities on his likfe and that of his brother and parents are explored, and their hopes and plans for the future are discussed