James Gilligan

MODULATION OF CARRAGEENAN-INDUCED HIND PAW EDEMA BY SUBSTANCE P

Substance P has been implicated as a mediator of inflammation. The involvement of this neuropeptide in carrageenan-induced hind paw edema in the rat was assessed. Subcutaneous injection of carrageenan into the rat paw caused a significant increase in substance P levels, which preceded the onset of inflammation. While injection of substance P alone caused mild edema, coadministration of submaximal doses of carrageenan and substance P resulted in a synergistic exacerbation in the degree of inflammation. This synergistic response was not detected when the nonamidated precursor of substance P was coinjected with carrageenan. The effects of substance P depletion on inflammation were also evaluated. In animals pretreated with capsaicin followed by injection with carrageenan, no significant increase in either the levels of substance P or the extent of edema was observed when compared to capsaicin-treated controls. These results indicate that substance P may play an important role in the early stages of carrageenan-induced paw edema and that a reduction in the biosynthesis of substance P may lessen the severity of this inflammatory response.

Beyond the Prison Paradigm: From Provoking Violence to Preventing It by Creating “Anti-Prisons” (Residential Colleges and Therapeutic Communities)

Abstract: Prisons were supposedly created for the purpose of the tertiary prevention of violence (i.e., reducing the frequency and severity of future violence on the part of people who have already become violent). However, there is much evidence that this method of attempting to prevent violence is often, though not always, either ineffectual or counterproductive, in which case it is either a waste of money or actually exacerbates the problem it was ostensibly intended to solve. This article reviews evidence concerning those questions including an analysis of the effect of punishment (one of the main purposes of prisons) on violent behavior. Punishment—the infliction of pain—will be distinguished from restraint (incapacitation, separation from the community). Successful examples of violence prevention in unconventional prison programs, emphasizing therapy and education rather than punishment, and restorative rather than retributive justice, will be summarized, together with evidence that these programs reduce re‐incarceration rates so substantially that they actually save the taxpayers more money than they cost, in addition to enhancing the safety of the general public. The position is taken that traditional prisons provoke more violence than they prevent and are so fundamentally flawed that they cannot be reformed; we argue that they should instead be abolished and replaced by “anti‐prisons,” that is, locked, secure residential colleges, therapeutic communities, and centers for human development. Prisons will come to be seen as a well‐meaning experiment that failed, rather like the use of leeches in medicine.

The psychopharmacologic treatment of violent youth.

Abstract: Aggressive violence has been described as the greatest problem and the most frequent reason for referrals in child and adolescent psychiatry. In this country we have only partially emerged from an epidemic of violence that was really an epidemic of youth violence. Thus it is hardly surprising that psychiatrists are being asked more and more frequently whether psychiatric medications might help to diminish the toll from this behavioral plague. Medications are useful and appropriate for only a small minority of the people who commit serious violence. Even when they are indicated, they can never be the sole treatment modality, but should be supplemented by psychological and social therapies. When the violence is a byproduct or symptom of an underlying mental illness, treating that illness is generally the most effective method of preventing future violence on a long‐term basis. However, most violence is not committed by those who are mentally ill, and most of the mentally ill never commit a serious act of violence. That is why many attempts have been made to discover whether there are drugs that diminish the symptom, violence, even when there is no underlying mental illness for which drugs would normally be prescribed. In fact there are several, and their indications and use are reviewed here. Different principles govern the acute short‐term emergency treatment of a violent crisis and the long‐term treatment of those who are chronically and repetitively violent, and these differences are also summarized here.

Transforming Our World: Implementing the 2030 Agenda Through Sustainable Development Goal Indicators.

Abstract The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes violence as a threat to sustainability. To serve as a context, we provide an overview of the Sustainable Development Goals as they relate to violence prevention by including a summary of key documents informing violence prevention efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA) partners. After consultation with the United Nations (UN) Inter-Agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDG), we select specific targets and indicators, featuring them in a summary table. Using the diverse expertise of the authors, we assign attributes that characterize the focus and nature of these indicators. We hope that this will serve as a preliminary framework for understanding these accountability metrics. We include a brief analysis of the target indicators and how they relate to promising practices in violence prevention.

Violence and health: implications of the 2030 Agenda for South–North collaboration

Through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations (UN 2015) invited the world to collaborate in an inclusive, long-ranging vision for the future. It highlights our interdependence and collective responsibility for human life on this planet. Preventing violence is at the heart of its ambitious agenda to ‘‘promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development’’ (UN 2015: Goal 16). Recognizing that violence not just causes death and disability but limits creativity, economic growth, and general well-being, it begins to conceive of a world without violence. In September 2015, the global campaign for violence prevention (GCVP), the World Health Organization (WHO) Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA) meeting, and the first VPA academic meeting converged in Geneva before the launch of the 2030 Agenda to discuss ‘‘Linking Global Violence Prevention with Sustainable Development.’’ The meetings underscored that 90 % of global violence occurs in regions that contribute only 10 % of published research and led to this special issue. Compiling mostly scientific research, this issue complements the policy papers of a companion VPA special issue with the Journal of Public Health Policy (Lee et al. 2016). The core of the WHO VPA’s mission lies in multisectoral collaboration and interdisciplinary integration. Contributions by member networks to this special issue range in discipline as well as research methods to offer cross-geographic and -cultural perspectives. In an invited editorial, Kjaerulf and colleagues of the VPA present an overview of the 2030 Agenda and the need for researchers and interventionists to work boldly toward violence prevention. Eslami and colleagues then report on a large-scale study of European countries of variable income in a neglected area of research even for the Global North: the demographics of elder abuse. For the rest of the issue, articles are divided by 2016 World Bank income classifications, with the most important category coming last. Goodall and colleagues from Scotland, Wathen and colleagues from Canada, and Johansen and Tjørnhøj-Thomsen from Denmark show how intricate data collection in the Global North could be a guide to studies in the Global South. We discover how using a public health framework to monitor alcohol use, distinguishing the different experiences and trajectories of intimate partner violence (IPV), and developing a broader approach to the oft-underestimated consequences of stalking can contribute to a more thorough understanding of violence. This editorial is part of the special issue ‘‘Violence and Health: Implications of the 2030 Agenda for South–North Collaboration’’.

Can psychoanalysis help us to understand the causes and prevention of violence

As the most adequate theory of human personality yet created, including our propensity for irrational, self-defeating, and self-destructive behavior patterns, psychoanalysis is in a unique position to help us solve the most serious crisis that the human species has been confronted by at any point in its evolutionary history: the threat to its own survival that is caused by its own behavior, namely the compulsion to engage in violence on the largest scale that its technology makes possible, even when that causes the death of the self as well as of others. This continually expanding behavior pattern, which reduces even genocide to a minor footnote compared with the self-extinction of our whole species, is created not only by “apocalyptic” fundamentalism and terrorism (“suicide bombers”), but also by the increasing and only partially preventable proliferation of thermonuclear weapons to national rulers of questionable sanity, and the apparently unpreventable continuation of industrial/economic policies and practices that will, if not reversed, make our own small planet uninhabitable. What makes people place a higher value on the continuation of these behaviors than they place on their own physical survival (or that of their children)? That is the question to which this article proposes at least the beginnings of an answer: that when a person feels shamed and humiliated to a degree that threatens the survival of that fragile and vulnerable psychological construct called his “self” (or of the religious or cultural group with which his self has identified), he will eagerly sacrifice his body (and other peoples’) in the attempt to, as he sees it, save his soul, i.e. his self and his self-esteem. The question then becomes: what are the social and psychological determinants of overwhelming shame and humiliation, and how can we protect people from being exposed to those conditions, or at least enhance their ability to respond to them in ways that are life-preserving rather than life-destroying?

A case for studying country regimes in the public health model of violence

Many national and international institutions advocate approaching violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine, in a manner similar to the way we address other disabling and life-threatening pathologies such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Prevention by a health model requires an ecological perspective. Previous work has found evidence that economic factors, including unemployment and relative poverty, as well as political culture and values, may affect violent death rates, including homicide and suicide. Nevertheless, wider political analyses of the effects that different regimes have on these variables have been notably absent, for understandable reasons given the sheer complexity of patterns of governance throughout the world. In view of the importance and scale of the problem, and implications of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we feel it is nevertheless important to bring regime types into the conversation of factors that can influence violent death.

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development: a golden opportunity for global violence prevention

On September 25, 2015, all member states of the United Nations adopted the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. The United Nations General Assembly approved seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 subtargets (United Nations 2015). History has shown that setting visionary goals can help unite leaders and decision-makers with researchers and practitioners worldwide toward an overarching, common cause. The millennium development goals (MDGs) of 2000 incorporated clear indicators to measure progress until the deadline of 2015, and moved the global development agenda forward with some notable successes. For example, it cut extreme poverty in half, and the successes led to the SDGs. However, the landmark study Conflict, Security, and Development (World Bank 2011) and the recent report States of Fragility 2015 (OECD 2015) remind us that a great portion of the populations and countries in the world missed the boat. One and a half billion people (21 % of the world’s population) who live in “fragile states” with conflict, organized crime, violence, and other insecure situations did not get their fair share of development benefits. This includes countries with: (1) homicide rates higher than 10 (per 100,000 a year), (2) civil wars (number of killed higher than 1000 a year), (3) UN or regional peacebuilding or peacekeeping mandate, and (4) low income levels with particularly weak institutions, conditions that place citizens at high risk for violence and conflict (World Bank 2011). Trends in global progress show a growing concentration of poverty and weak human development in countries affected by fragility. There is an increasing consensus that reversing these trends will require considerable efforts to decrease violence, to improve access to justice, and to strengthen institutions. Measures to reduce fragility like building state capacity and inclusive institutions, social and economic resilience, human security, peace, justice, and violence prevention were not included in the MDGs. In both fragile and non-fragile states, people across the world experience increased vulnerability to the epidemic of violence due to a number of factors, including (but not limited to) gender and age, disability, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, and displacement/refugee status and/or statelessness. These earlier, ‘missed’ factors are among the new themes that have received special attention in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. This is good news for the enormous number of people around the world living with violence and fear as part of their everyday lives, and for the community of committed violence prevention researchers and practitioners that participate in the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA), as well as other researchers, actors, and activists against violence. This is the moment we have strived for. It presents a golden opportunity for creating a strong momentum for global violence prevention—especially for the least-favored, most vulnerable countries... Language: en

Spare the Rod: Why Are More American Children Victims and Perpetrators of Violence Than Those of Any Other Developed Country?

Children are perhaps the last of the great demographic groups that our society has finally begun to recognize as being systematically discriminated against, and in some ways even persecuted – though I should add that the battle for recognition of that fact is still an ongoing struggle that is far from won. We have already dealt with many other demographic groups of whom one could have said the same thing – for example, many minority groups, the poor, the disabled, women, and gays – the only difference being that with them, the recognition of their plight and the taking of concrete steps to amend it was begun decades ago, whereas the recognition of the degree to which we have been simultaneously and disproportionately punitive toward and neglectful of our own children is still only minimally recognized and mostly denied, whether at the level of public opinion in general, or of meaningful national policy changes in particular. That the face-saving defense mechanism of denial is the cause of our blindness toward the facts is the only explanation I can think of to explain the continuation of our indefensible treatment of our own children, given that the facts of their situation and the means of solving it have been laid out so clearly by the pioneering and dedicated advocates for children in our nation who have been tirelessly trying to bring this problem to our attention – among them scholars (James Garbarino), legislators (Congressman George Miller), and philanthropists (Irving Harris). This chapter can be read as one extended argument for the proposition that while we have already identified race, class and gender as categories that need to be addressed in order to bring to an end the discrimination that occurs against blacks and other minority groups, the poor, women and gays, we now need to add age – specifically, young age: childhood, adolescence and young adulthood – to the list as the next category we need to include in our roster of socially important areas where fundamental progress is urgently needed.