CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health articles from June 2006

CrossCurrents - The Journal of Addiction and Mental Health archives from June 2006

Note from the editor.(housing and heart diseases)(Editorial)
June 22, 2006... On my walk to work recently, I passed a public service advertisement for heart disease awareness, with the campaign slogan, "Open your door and help us find the answers to heart disease." Underneath, someone had scrawled "Housing!" Indeed,...

A view from CAMH.(Centre for Addiction and Mental Health)
June 22, 2006... This issue of CrossCurrents provides extraordinary human stories around housing and homelessness that remind us of the centrality of housing to our survival, our dignity and our stability. The historical perspective on the evolution of CAMH...

Scratching the surface: criminalized women express their lives through art.(profile)
June 22, 2006... On Wednesday nights, in downtown Winnipeg, a group of women get together at the Crossing Communities Art Project to share a meal, discuss what's going on in their lives and make art. Tonight in the studio, they're making retablos, based on...

Hospital design reflects shift in attitudes, treatment of mental illness and addiction.(news)
June 22, 2006... Years of planning are about to become reality when the ceremonial shovel breaks ground for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's (CAMH) Queen Street redevelopment late summer/ fall 2006. Many are wondering what is driving the planned...

Alcohol dependency more common in risk-taking men.(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Risk-taking behaviour and male sex may increase the risk of alcohol dependency for people who have a family history of dependency, according to researchers at the University of Oklahoma. Researchers studied 175 men and women between 18 and 30...

Diabetes increased in people with schizophrenia.(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... The prevalence of diabetes is significantly higher in people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder relative to the general population, regardless of the use of or type of antipsychotic medication, according to a Dutch study....

Depression risk increases in young women after heart attack.(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Compared with other age and gender groups, women under age 60 are at increased risk for depressive symptoms after acute myocardial infarction (MI). In the community setting, depression is known to be especially prevalent among younger women,...

Mental health issues may not affect longevity in HIV.(human immunodeficiency virus)
June 22, 2006... HIV-positive individuals with mental health disorders survive as long as HIV-positive people with good mental health, according to researchers at the Victorian HIV Psychiatry Consortium in Melbourne, Australia. The researchers performed a...

Binge behaviour spikes with stress.(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Stressed individuals might be particularly prone to binge eating or drug addiction because of high levels of a hormone mechanism in their brain, according to University of Michigan and Georgetown University research. Researchers injected rats...

Visual cues linked to desire to smoke.
June 22, 2006... When people expect to smoke in the near future, external cues such as watching someone smoke affect their brains more than their level of craving or how long they have gone without a cigarette, according to researchers at McGill University in...

Unhappy marriage may harm older adults' health.(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Marital strain may be particularly damaging to older adults' health, according to a study out of the University of Texas-Austin. While research shows that married people often enjoy better health than singles, studies have suggested that an...

A guidepost, a marker, a map: a journey from homelessness to home.(focus)(Personal account)
June 22, 2006... SOMETIMES OUR DEEPEST PAIN CAN BECOME OUR GREATEST strength. The most fragile and broken bits can heal and become the most resilient, durable part of ourselves. After my struggle with homelessness and mental illness, I came home--the...

"Get a job!" Eight myths and misconceptions about people who are homeless.(focus)
June 22, 2006... PHILLIP HOZER, A MEMBER OF VOICES FROM THE STREET: The Toronto Homelessness Speakers Bureau, spoke with homeless people at the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre in Toronto. These myths and misconceptions are based on recurring themes that...

Homecoming: one woman's quest for a place to call her own.(focus)
June 22, 2006... THIS IS THE STORY OF ONE WOMAN'S STRUGGLE TO FIND and maintain a place called home. Not just a room with a bed and furniture, but a place in which she could emotionally invest, and upon which she could rely to remain hers. Esther is not this...

Pillars of support: against all odds, housing workers keep homes steady.(focus)
June 22, 2006... PAULA WYNTER HAS BEEN A HOUSING SUPPORT WORKER with the Toronto branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) for five years. In her business, that means she's a veteran, one of the few who have maintained the resolve needed to battle...

Searching for home: addressing the need for culturally appropriate supportive housing.(focus)
June 22, 2006... BY THE TIME BINH * MADE THE PHONE CALL TO TORONTO'S Hong Fook Mental Health Association, he had nowhere else to go. He had just about exhausted all of his options--renting apartments and getting evicted four times; rooming in a boarding house...

Beyond shelter: youth-work program provides long-term solutions to homelessness.(focus)
June 22, 2006... JILL PITTMAN FIRST STARTED LEAVING HER ST. JOHN'S, Newfoundland, home when she was 12 years old. "It was an abusive home situation with a lot of fighting and hostility," she says. That was when she started drinking and smoking marijuana. By the...

The challenges of starting a supportive housing program.(interview of Brigitte Witkowski )(Interview)
June 22, 2006... This Q&A is based on an interview with Brigitte Witkowski, co-chair of the Home-Coming Community Choice Coalition. The Toronto-based coalition promotes the rights of people with mental illness to live where they choose and uses education,...

Ambivalence in psychotherapy: moving toward change.(Ambivalence in Psychotherapy: Facilitating Readiness to Change)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Ambivalence in Psychotherapy: Facilitating Readiness to Change is an ambitious book. It provides considerable information and useful models for dealing with ambivalence in psychotherapy. Authors Engle and Arkowitz attempt to redefine some...

Housing the homeless.(downloaded)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... CAMH Housing Guide 2004-2006 This guide is available online in pdf downloadable format and as a searchable database. Being online has the advantage of enabling updates since the publication of the print guide. The scope is Toronto, Peel and...

Why is progress so slow on supportive housing?(the last word)
June 22, 2006... A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail about New York State's recent commitment to fund 9,000 supportive housing units at a cost of $1 billion. Last spring, the Dream Team, a group of people living with mental illness and Toronto supportive...

Conferences.(calendar)(Calendar)
June 22, 2006... CANADA 2006 Schizophrenia Society of Canada National Conference July 13-15, Winnipeg, Manitoba Contact: Schizophrenia Society of Canada, 50 Acadia Ave., Ste. 205, Markham, ON L3R 0B3 tel 905 415-2007 fax 905 415-2337 ...

Making gains 2006.(conferences of health care industry)(Brief article)
June 22, 2006... Conference November 5-8, 2006 Toronto, Ontario HEALTHCARE TRANSFORMATION IN ONTARIO: EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION? The theme of Making Gains 2006, examines the response of mental health and addictions to rapid change in the healthcare...

Theology and the intellectual life.(Editorial)
June 22, 2006... In 1997 the following reflections were published by a well known Harvard University professor: [T]he right to religious liberty is not best understood as a particular case of a more general right to individual autonomy. ...

Religion and the university.
June 22, 2006... Universities have become the milieu in which certain types of people live, yet these milieus shift from epoch to epoch, and culture to culture. Indeed, the same can be said for religion, as the term 'religion' can mean vastly different things...

An accidental theologian: thoughts on Islam in public and private religious universities.
June 22, 2006... There are seven issues that I raise in this essay about the teaching of religion in general and Islam in particular in a university setting. They are: teaching Islam; the nature of the university; the normative type of Islam taught;...

Theology in the curriculum of a secular Religious Studies department.
June 22, 2006... The title comes at Jeff Stout's instigation: it would not have been mine. (1) Both title and paper betray a certain self-importance. When I arrived at the University of Virginia in 1993, culture wars--now a decade behind us (or again...

What does it mean to receive tradition? Jewish studies in higher education.
June 22, 2006... Y'all might assume that a paper on the relationship between a college education and Jewish studies takes on a topic that is oh-so-very last millennium, and should thereby be deplored. Indeed, you'd have good reason to make this assumption....

Self and text: towards a comparative theology of the self.
June 22, 2006... Thinking about ourselves has always been one of the main preoccupations of human beings since the development of reflexive awareness and different cultural histories have come up with quite a wide variety of views about human identity although...

Religion and beauty in the classroom.
June 22, 2006... This is a short report on teaching a course on late medieval and early renaissance art in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in the summer of 2004. The question I pose for the reader is: was I teaching 'theology' or 'religion' in this course? My...

Companion to the Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI on "God is love".
June 22, 2006... Pope Benedict XVI's much anticipated first Encyclical has been welcomed as evidence of a more congenial personality, of a less severe figure than his tenure as supervising Cardinal of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had...

Naipaul's travelogues and the "clash of civilizations" complex.(V.S. Naipaul )
June 22, 2006... With Naipaul, the controversial writer par excellence, one is neither neutral nor indifferent. The critical response to his travelogue pronouncements are characterized by a clear cultural cleavage: Anglo-American critics celebrate him as the...

Attending to the pain of the dying: an agenda for science.
June 22, 2006... In 1905, Columbia University built a magnificent brick and limestone palace of science, Schermerhorn Hall, for its new and expanding departments of geology, botany, and zoology. Carved on its facade is the inscription "Speak to the Earth and it...

Mutualistic? Commensal? Parasitic?(Books)(Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Daniel Dennett Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Viking, 2006. 448pp. $25.95 From cable TV (Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, Penn and Teller) to the blogosphere (theonion.com,whitehouse.org,WorkingForChange.org.) to...

Repenting of theology.(Books)(Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Randi Rashkover Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig and the Politics of Praise T & T Clark, 2005. 215pp. $130 (hb); $49.95 (pb). Now that the West no longer situates itself against godless communists, but against other...

Keeping God's Silence.(BOOKS IN BRIEF)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Keeping God's Silence Rachel Muers Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 246pp. In Keeping God's Silence, Rachel Muers probes the issue of communication and silence and their implications for the moral life. A lecturer at the University of...

Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?(BOOKS IN BRIEF)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? James K.A. Smith Baker Academic, 2006. 156 pp. Is the Devil from Paris? This is James K.A. Smith's opening question in his new book, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Smith sets out to challenge the...

Dictionary of Third World Theologies.(BOOKS IN BRIEF)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Dictionary of Third World Theologies Virginia Fabella and R.S. Sugirtharajah, eds. Orbis Books, 2000. 261 pp. Discussing third world theology is in itself a difficult task. Writing a comprehensive dictionary on the subject would...

God's Companions.(BOOKS IN BRIEF)(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2006... God's Companions Samuel Wells Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 224 pp. It is a common complaint that God's presence in today's world is hardly noticeable. In this warmly written, charmingly humane book, Samuel Wells contends that the...