Reconceptualizing cannabis use risks in the context of health and social inequities: Insights from a qualitative study with young people in Canada.

BACKGROUND: Cannabis became legal in Canada in 2018. Since then, calls for research to evaluate the impact of legalization on youth have been at the forefront of public and academic discussions. Research addressing these calls has largely focused on issues of risk and harm, with limited attention to the role of social context in shaping youth cannabis use. This paper presents the findings of a study that centered youth perspectives on cannabis use in the context of health and social inequities. METHODS: Between 2021 and 2022, we undertook an exploratory and critical qualitative interview study with 56 youth from across Canada who use cannabis and who reported experiences with health or social struggles, broadly self-defined. Our analysis followed a reflexive thematic approach and leveraged theoretical perspectives from critical drug studies to interrogate youths' variegated cannabis use risks and risk environments, whilst facilitating inquiry into their interface with overlapping forms of hardship and inequity. FINDINGS: We developed three interconnected themes: (i) cannabis use risks as contextually situated; (ii) cannabis use as a practice of care; and (iii) cannabis use as a survival tool in connection with trauma and violence. Findings within and across these themes centre on the nexus of intentionality and agency in youth narratives of using cannabis and situates their cannabis use in connection with, and in response to, intersecting health and social inequities. CONCLUSION: This study underscores opportunities for a reconsideration or reconceptualization of risks in the context of youth cannabis use, so that approaches to supporting youth who use cannabis are more resonant and credible with those who experience health and social inequities. Findings offer direction for youth cannabis policy and programming, including to decenter individual pathology, support harm reduction goals, and further consider relationships between cannabis use and context, marginalization, and oppression.

Last Word: Ending the intergenerational transmission of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating: a call to investigate the mother-daughter relationship.

The ubiquity and gravity of female body dissatisfaction and disordered eating has motivated countless academics and practitioners to better understand and treat these issues. Many researchers have found familial, and more specifically maternal influence, to impact daughters' development of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Researchers have demonstrated that mothers who struggle with body dissatisfaction and disordered eating tend to transmit and reinforce harmful weight-related attitudes and behaviours to their daughters, which has been found to result in the development of daughters' own body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. Regardless of these findings, little research has been conducted to explore the ways in which mothers can attempt to end the intergenerational transmission of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating to daughters. As such, in this article, we call researchers and practitioners to fill this gap in knowledge.

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes.

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson-Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, "Oh there s/he goes again," or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential-particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.

Doing recovery online.

Although problem gambling is becoming more prevalent, research shows that many problem gamblers do not seek help. Online social support forums have become an increasingly popular option for receiving support for problem gambling. Few researchers have explored how participants within these forums interact, or what is supportive about participation in online communities. Melding netnography (ethnographic approaches online), discourse analysis, and ethnomethodology, we analyzed the discursive interactions of self-identified problem gamblers on an online forum. We report on the characteristics of this unique setting, the common discourses that members used, and how they discursively accomplished various interactional tasks, including constructing identities, and negotiating membership, legitimacy, and support. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners and researchers interested in better understanding people trying to overcome problem gambling and other behavioral concerns.

Compulsive features in behavioural addictions: the case of pathological gambling.

AIMS: To describe, in the context of DSM-V, how a focus on addiction and compulsion is emerging in the consideration of pathological gambling (PG). METHODS: A systematic literature review of evidence for the proposed re-classification of PG as an addiction. RESULTS: Findings include: (i) phenomenological models of addiction highlighting a motivational shift from impulsivity to compulsivity associated with a protracted withdrawal syndrome and blurring of the ego-syntonic/ego-dystonic dichotomy; (ii) common neurotransmitter (dopamine, serotonin) contributions to PG and substance use disorders (SUDs); (iii) neuroimaging support for shared neurocircuitries between 'behavioural' and substance addictions and differences between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), impulse control disorders (ICDs) and SUDs; (iv) genetic findings more closely related to endophenotypic constructs such as compulsivity and impulsivity than to psychiatric disorders; (v) psychological measures such as harm avoidance identifying a closer association between SUDs and PG than with OCD; (vi) community and pharmacotherapeutic trials data supporting a closer association between SUDs and PG than with OCD. Adapted behavioural therapies, such as exposure therapy, appear applicable to OCD, PG or SUDs, suggesting some commonalities across disorders. CONCLUSIONS: PG shares more similarities with SUDs than with OCD. Similar to the investigation of impulsivity, studies of compulsivity hold promising insights concerning the course, differential diagnosis and treatment of PG, SUDs, and OCD.

Employed mothers' worker ideology and social support network composition.

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine employed mothers' social support network composition in relation to their orientation to worker ideology. A reanalysis of data from two longitudinal, interview studies was conducted. Ecomaps were developed to depict women's social support network composition, revealing five types of support sources: household family, nonhousehold family, friends and neighbors, workplace, and formal services. A typology of diverse, restricted, and mixed networks, reflecting patterns in availability, consistency, and types of support sources, was identified and analyzed in relation to women's orientation to worker ideology. Women with innovator or conformist orientations to worker ideology tended to have mixed or diverse networks. Women with a conformist orientation did not utilize formal services but tended to have a supportive workplace. Most of the women who transitioned into an innovator orientation had available, consistent support, most notably from household family.