Reducing mental health disparities through transformative learning: a social change model with refugees and students.

Distribution of power and resources greatly impacts the mental health of individuals and communities. Thus, to reduce mental health disparities, it is imperative to address these social determinants of mental health through social change. Engaging in social change efforts requires people to critically engage with present conditions on personal, local, national, and global levels and to develop knowledge, capacity, and experience with envisioning and creating more equitable conditions.

Reducing refugee mental health disparities: a community-based intervention to address postmigration stressors with African adults.

Refugees resettled in the United States have disproportionately high rates of psychological distress. Research has demonstrated the roles of postmigration stressors, including lack of meaningful social roles, poverty, unemployment, lack of environmental mastery, discrimination, limited English proficiency, and social isolation. We report a multimethod, within-group longitudinal pilot study involving the adaptation for African refugees of a community-based advocacy and learning intervention to address postmigration stressors.

Fetal alcohol exposure alters GAP-43 phosphorylation and protein kinase C responses to contextual fear conditioning in the hippocampus of adult rat offspring.

Background: The growth- and plasticity-associated protein GAP-43 plays a significant role in the establishment and remodeling of neuronal connections. We have previously shown that GAP-43 levels, protein kinase C (PKC) activity, and GAP-43 phosphorylation increase during contextual fear conditioning and that fetal alcohol exposure (FAE) decreases PKC activity and GAP-43 phosphorylation in the hippocampus of adult offspring. Drawing on these observations, we hypothesized that FAE manifests its cognitive impairment by disrupting PKC activation and membrane translocation, thereby decreasing GAP-43 phosphorylation and function.