Mental health first-aid training may enhance mental health support in prison settings
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 4-May-2024 06:09 ET (4-May-2024 10:09 GMT/UTC)
According to Rutgers Health researchers, training correctional officers in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) for adults, a 7.5-hour national education program from the National Council of Mental Wellbeing, may help provide them with the necessary skills to effectively identify signs and symptoms of mental distress and advocate for incarcerated individuals facing mental health crises.
The number of male students at the University of Oxford from elite schools declined significantly by the middle of the twentieth century, a new study shows.
WILMINGTON, Del. (May 1, 2024) – Researchers from Nemours Children’s Health will present findings from a range of studies at the 2024 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) Meeting, May 2-6 in Toronto. Key presentations will address pediatric mental health, vaccination, autism diagnosis, social determinants of cardiovascular health and treatment of bronchiolitis—one of the most common respiratory illnesses in children that requires hospitalization.
When the Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) launched in 2018, they were looking forward to the future. Like many other areas of commerce and big tech, agriculture is a rapidly changing industry. Advancements in technology have transformed farming. In the five-plus years since its launch, CDA has risen to meet those needs by creating adaptable, interdisciplinary curriculums, research programs, industry partnerships and training opportunities for scientists and students.
This year, CDA is celebrating its successes and more at the annual Center for Digital Agriculture conference, hosted right here on the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign campus at the iHotel and Illinois Conference Center. With a slate of new leadership, CDA has hosted the biggest and brightest conference yet with a theme of the “Future of Digital Agriculture,” an ambitious theme for an even more ambitious organization. CDA’s efforts to sustain the current needs of agriculture and anticipate future needs have been highly successful so far, with programs designed to train new experts in digital agriculture and repeated success in obtaining competitive grants for research in digital agriculture.
In experiments in isolated villages in Honduras, researchers evaluated a new strategy for identifying individuals that could be targeted for effective information spreading. Their approach – more effective than random targeting, and also less time-requisite than approaches that require a complete understanding of the relevant social network – could have far-reaching policy implications in lower and middle-income countries. Understanding the structure and function of human social networks has yielded insights for exploiting social contagion – the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and practices through the members of a group. Such an approach could be used to disseminate important information, including public health interventions. However, deliberately fostering social contagion in face-to-face social networks requires identifying the structurally influential individuals, or “seeds,” to maximize information spillover. Although previous research has suggested several ways to identify these individuals, all existing methods have generally required mapping the entire social network’s structure, which is often expensive, time-consuming, and infeasible in real-world face-to-face situations. Through various field experiments, Edoardo Airoldi and Nicholas Christakis evaluated whether it’s possible to identify the best “seeds” within a group without having to map the entire network. Airoldi and Christakis performed a large, randomized controlled trial of network targeting among 24,702 people in 176 isolated villages in Honduras. The authors randomly assigned villages to friendship targeting methods, varying the fractions of households receiving a 22-month health education package and the method by which these households were chosen. According to the authors, a friendship targeting strategy leveraging the so-called “friendship paradox” of human social networks, which states that, on average, the friends of randomly selected individuals are more central to the social network than those who identify them, was able to substantially reduce the number of households that needed to be targeted to attain a specified level of village-wide uptake. “Deploying interventions through network targeting, without increasing the number of people targeted or the expense incurred, may enhance the adoption and spread of the interventions and thereby improve human welfare,” write Airoldi and Christakis.
For news outlets interested in building their own data visualizations, data usable to draw network pictures for 11 of the involved villages is available here: https://yale.app.box.com/s/9q1r2grrugtlr5yqtsm9wdhjdx9wgflk. The authors will be happy to provide guidance regarding what subset of the data to use.