Mental health stigma: a conundrum for healthcare practitioners in conservative communities.

This paper presents perspectives on the stigma and shame around mental health in conservative communities, and some of the issues faced by health systems in those communities. The various causes of stigma are explored, and how these are often more pronounced in culturally reserved, conservative communities. While health systems are supposed to provide support for mental health sufferers, this stigma sometimes even extends to healthcare workers, which can discourage patients from asking for assistance.

Automated method for detecting increases in frequency of spontaneous adverse event reports over time.

A statistical methodology--focused on temporal change detection--was developed to highlight excursions from baseline spontaneous adverse event (AE) reporting. We used regression (both smooth trend and seasonal components) to model the time course of a drug's reports containing an AE, and then compared the sum of counts in the past 2 months with the fitted trend. The signaling threshold was tuned, using retrospective analysis, to yield acceptable sensitivity and specificity.

Parents with learning difficulties in the child protection system: experiences and perspectives.

The article documents the views and feelings of parents with learning difficulties as they reflect on their first-hand experience of going through care proceedings. Drawing on interviews conducted as part of a wider study of how cases involving mothers and fathers with learning difficulties are handled by the child protection system and the family courts, the authors provide a parental perspective on assessments, support, case conferences and the court process as well as the after-effects on the families themselves.

Parents Together: action research and advocacy support for parents with learning difficulties.

This paper describes the work of Parents Together, a pioneering action research project that set out to support parents with learning difficulties in ways that were non-stigmatising, non-intrusive and responsive to their perceptions of their own needs. Based on an explicit model of parenting and social support, Parents Together used an advocacy approach to challenge discriminatory views of parents' competence and to lighten the load on families by reducing the environmental pressures that undermined them. The paper concludes by drawing out the wider lessons of the project for policy and practice.