War Illness Research Articles

Prevalence of Chronic Multisymptom Illness/Gulf War Illness Over Time Among Millennium Cohort Participants, 2001 to 2016.

Chronic multisymptom illness/Gulf War illness (CMI/GWI) is the defining illness of the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War. However, few studies have examined changes over time in CMI/GWI prevalence. Prevalence of CMI/GWI over time was compared between three groups of military personnel (9110 Gulf War veterans, 36,019 era personnel, 31,446 non-era personnel) enrolled in the Millennium Cohort Study. Post hoc analyses were conducted among participants with no reported mental and physical health conditions (N = 30,093). CMI/GWI prevalence increased substantially over the study period among all groups. Gulf War veterans had the highest prevalence of CMI/GWI across the study period. This finding persisted after excluding participants with mental and physical health conditions. Gulf War veterans' increased risk of CMI/GWI persisted across the study period, highlighting the continued importance of screening and improving treatment options among this population.

PPR IMPLEMENTATION IN MICRO TEACHING COURSE TO IMPROVE STUDENTS’ CONFIDENCE AND COMPASSION

Apart from technical skills, people must also be educated in social values. This is pertinent in developing well-rounded, socially-aware students. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous developmental disability characterized primarily by atypical, repetitive, routinary behavior, as well as impairments in socialization and communication. Despite comprising approximately 1-2% of the world’s population, people with ASD are greatly stigmatized, leading to an overall lower quality of life for them. In order to address this stigmatization, awareness and empathy must be induced in non-autistic, neurotypical people. The rise of serious games or games with a purpose has provided a different avenue for spreading awareness to an audience whose primary interest lies in digital games. Multiple games have been created to spread awareness for issues such as war, cultural discrimination, and mental illness. This study aims to determine whether serious games can also be used to increase autism awareness and lessen the stigma against people with autism. This study makes use of the digital game In Someone Else’s Shoes, which simulates some behaviors of a college student with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder. For this study, 30 participants were asked to answer a survey on their perceptions on people with autism before playing the game. After which, they answered the same survey again to see if their perceptions had changed, and answered an additional self-report on how the game affected them. While there is minimal change in the perceptions of the players before and after playing the game, the self-report shows that majority of the players expressed feeling more informed about autism, showing a positive cognitive response. However, players reported that the game was not as effective at eliciting an emotional response from them, though they still expressed a willingness to aid someone with autism. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/ijiet.2018.020103

DIGITAL GAME FOR STUDENTS WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Apart from technical skills, people must also be educated in social values. This is pertinent in developing well-rounded, socially-aware students. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous developmental disability characterized primarily by atypical, repetitive, routinary behavior, as well as impairments in socialization and communication. Despite comprising approximately 1-2% of the worlds population, people with ASD are greatly stigmatized, leading to an overall lower quality of life for them. In order to address this stigmatization, awareness and empathy must be induced in non-autistic, neurotypical people. The rise of serious games or games with a purpose has provided a different avenue for spreading awareness to an audience whose primary interest lies in digital games. Multiple games have been created to spread awareness for issues such as war, cultural discrimination, and mental illness. This study aims to determine whether serious games can also be used to increase autism awareness and lessen the stigma against people with autism. This study makes use of the digital game In Someone Elses Shoes, which simulates some behaviors of a college student with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder. For this study, 30 participants were asked to answer a survey on their perceptions on people with autism before playing the game. After which, they answered the same survey again to see if their perceptions had changed, and answered an additional self-report on how the game affected them. While there is minimal change in the perceptions of the players before and after playing the game, the self-report shows that majority of the players expressed feeling more informed about autism, showing a positive cognitive response. However, players reported that the game was not as effective at eliciting an emotional response from them, though they still expressed a willingness to aid someone with autism.DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/ijiet.2018.020103

Truth, death and memory in Christine Brooke-Rose’s autobiographical writings

ABSTRACTChristine Brooke-Rose published two ostensibly autobiographical works; the quasi-fictionalised ‘antibiography’ Remake and Life: End of which takes a philosophical rather than narrative form. Utilising correspondence and other personal documents, this paper concerns the notable life events which Brooke-Rose left unaddressed in her writing (war work, illness, marriage breakdown and poststructuralist feuding), the reasons for these excisions and what such a process reveals about the act of transcribing life. It is argued that Brooke-Rose’s approach to autobiography reflects in microcosm her deep concern for writing as both individual trace and transhuman memory; a sublime form made ridiculous by its everyday limitations.

Towards an Ethics of Witnessing: Traumatic Testimony in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

I argue that Rebecca West’s wartime novel The Return of the Soldier (1918) elaborates an ethics of witnessing occluded historical pasts. Its staging of testimony as an intertextual and allegorical discourse challenges a dominant critical paradigm of modernity which posits the Edwardian era and the Great War as traumatic ruptures in the continuity, stability, and stasis of an earlier period in British history. Although the novel appears to repeat this paradigm by plotting trauma as a soldier’s war illness that results in amnesia and mourning of a lost, apparently idyllic Victorian past, the rhetoric of witnessing troubles this narrative of loss. By invoking other literary representations of memory, testimony reveals how this nostalgic narrative obscures colonial trauma and socio-political and economic inequities of gendering that shaped the Victorian era. I conclude that attending to testimony enables a precarious reconstruction of the age of empire from marginal perspectives enfolded in the novel.

War, Sociopolitical Adversity and Mental Illness

War, Sociopolitical Adversity and Mental Illness

Political Refugees' Violence in Norway

This paper is an attempt to explain why male refugees committed acts of violence in exile in Norway. Three cases, two homicides and one rape case, are presented together with the men who committed them. It is argued that violence occurs as a consequence of a combination of precipitating factors pertaining to the history and biography of the informants. The historical and biographical factors, such as war, refugee experiences and mental illnesses, work in combination with more immediate contextual factors which pertain to the refugees' subsequent experiences in Norway, such as social isolation, lack of treatment, alcohol abuse and precarious living conditions. The main hypothesis is that violent acts may be committed when somebody has been exposed to an intolerable amount of physical and/or psychic pressure and as a means of regaining control. Furthermore, Bourdieu's concept of habitus is a tool in the analysis of the men's violent acts.

Tracing Medulla as a Locus Eroticus

The subject of passionate love can mire even the most creative author in cliches. When we read the corpus of Greek and Latin love poems that span half a dozen centuries, from Sappho to Ovid, we quickly become accustomed to the conventional topoi, the “moon-in-June” scenarios of desire and frustration that survive to this day in popular song. This is not to say that love poets never invent anything new. Indeed, the best of them, working within the genre’s boundaries, develop striking variations on familiar themes. But it is rare to find a really fresh image in the age-old discourse of love. Sappho and the creative team employed by Hallmark Cards seem to share a (very long-lived) Muse. Love is often described in terms that are also applicable to other experiences, such as madness, war, or physical illness. The physiology of eros shares some of its terms with biology or medical science: passion can affect the mind, nerves, pulse, or tongue. In this paper, I will discuss one such “biological” erotic image: “marrow,” afi≈n or muelOw in Greek, medulla in Latin. The marrow, physically remote and insensate, deep within the bone or cerebro-spinal cavity, is not as accessible an image to the modern reader as, for example, a fluttering heart, another topos widely used by ancient authors. Why did poets choose to portray the marrow as a