Search results

France, once a pioneer in psychiatry, is now sinking as its population faces major mental health challenges. This includes the 12 Million French individuals with psychiatric conditions, the lack of appropriate structures and the shortage of skilled mental health professionals, but it also leaves families in critical situations. The purpose of this study is to explore the carers’ caregiving experiences and to suggest ways to organise educational programmes to support mental health carers in France.

The research was conducted from January 2018 to November 2019. It included French carers of patients with mental conditions. Recorded semi-structured interviews were used and findings were analysed through an inductive thematic analysis and regrouped into key themes.

Participants had overwhelming negative representations of “mental illness”. The fact that they were excluded from participating in the patient’s health management further added to their misconceptions around mental disability, it limited their communication with their family and amplified their burdens.

There is an urgent need for carer empowerment; carers should be included in educational programmes, they should benefit from French Government subsidies and social-network assistance and receive quality assistance by trained mental health professionals. The critical situation of carers can only be addressed by combining these three steps and through the action of appropriate actors in the field of mental health, thus alleviating the current paradigm of psychiatric care in France.

Thousands of research papers regarding carers have been published in other countries. In addition yet, to the knowledge, only a few investigations on French mental health carers have been conducted to this day. The singularity of this research lies in the rare individual interviews, which provided us with first-hand testimonies of mental health carers in France. This data could be of vital aid for professionals and for policymakers when advocating for better support of carers in mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that the university context may partially determine the growth of university spin-offs (USOs), with a cross-national analysis and using an “interactionist” approach.

Two samples of USOs, from Spain and Italy (531 and 952 firms, respectively), were examined over the 2005-2013 period. Multilevel modelling was applied to empirically test the hypotheses.

The results confirmed that the university context is a critical and effective element for explaining USOs’ growth. The university context affected USOs’ growth only for the Spanish firms, while for the Italian spin-offs the evidence does not report a significant determining influence of the university context. This finding may be interpreted as the localization externalities, determined by the Spanish universities, have a more effective impact at firm level compared with those generated by the Italian universities.

The paper provides evidence that the university context has a significant role in supporting USOs’ growth in Spain, but not in Italy. This finding, together with the fact that the Italian USOs showed lower growth rates over the period of analysis, may suggest that greater involvement by the Italian parent universities is needed to foster USOs’ growth. The main point to be underlined to decision makers is that policies aimed at fostering USOs need the active involvement of the parent university in the whole growth process of the nascent firm, rather than just in the USO creation process.

A multilevel approach provides both methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of USOs’ growth, which was adopted as an “interactionist” approach is recommended by literature. In addition, a cross-national approach allows for exploration of the actual effect of the university on the growth of USOs, taking into account international differences.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.