Category: Sociology of Health & Illness

During the early-21st century, social dementia research has experienced something of an ethnic turn. This trajectory is rooted in 1990s psychosocial accounts of dementia that newly championed the perspectives of people with dementia, and the subsequent realisation that these early perspectives were rather white. In response, researchers have increasingly sought to access the dementias of minority ethnicity groups living in high-income countries. Unfortunately, rather than meaningfully engaging with a greater diversity of dementias, much of this movement toward minority ethnicity...

This blog post summarises the main themes and concerns highlighted in the 2009 paper ‘Doing being ‘on the edge’: managing the dilemma of being authentically suicidal in an online forum’. The paper begins by outlining research into suicide and highlights that research into suicidal identities from a discursive perspective has not been widely established. The research demonstrates how discursive psychology can be useful in examining how suicidal identities can be built up in internet interaction. Using discursive psychology, suicidal identities...

“Concerns are rising about the late adverse events following gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy.” So opens the abstract of an article recently published in the Lancet detailing the results of a nationwide, observational, population-based, cohort study in France. In this study, researchers compared nearly 9,000 bariatric patients with matched controls looking at outcomes for both mortality and morbidity (specifically: gastrointestinal disorders with the need for endoscopy or surgery; gastrointestinal disorders without the need for these interventions; nutritional disorders, and psychiatric...