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A policy of surveillance which interferes with the fundamental right to a private life requires credible justification and a supportive evidence base. The authority for such interference should be clearly detailed in law, overseen by a transparent process and not left to the vagaries of administrative discretion. If a state surveils those it governs and claims the interference to be in the public interest, then the evidence base on which that claim stands and the operative conception of public interest should be subject to critical examination. Unfortunately, there is an inconsistency in the regulatory burden associated with access to confidential patient information for non-health-related surveillance purposes and access for health-related surveillance or research purposes. This inconsistency represents a systemic weakness to inform or challenge an evidence-based policy of non-health-related surveillance. This inconsistency is unjustified and undermines the qualities recognised to be necessary to maintain a trustworthy confidential public health service. Taking the withdrawn Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital and the Home Office as a worked example, this chapter demonstrates how the capacity of the law to constrain the arbitrary or unwarranted exercise of power through judicial review is not sufficient to level the playing field. The authors recommend ‘levelling up’ in procedural oversight, and adopting independent mechanisms equivalent to those adopted for establishing the operative conceptions of public interest in the context of health research to non-health-related surveillance purposes.

How does the human brain absorb information and turn it into skills of its own in psychotherapy? In an attempt to answer this question, the authors will review the intricacies of processing channels in psychotherapy and propose the term transprocessing (as in transduction and processing combined) for the underlying mechanisms. Through transprocessing the brain processes multimodal memories and creates reparative solutions in the course of psychotherapy. Transprocessing is proposed as a stage-sequenced mechanism of deconstruction of engrained patterns of response. Through psychotherapy, emotional-cognitive reintegration and its consolidation is accomplished. This process is mediated by cellular and neural plasticity changes.

Although first rank symptoms focus on positive symptoms of psychosis they are shared by a number of psychiatric conditions. The difficulty in differentiating bipolar disorder from schizophrenia with affective features has led to a third category of patients often loosely labeled as schizoaffective. Research in schizophrenia has attempted to render the presence or absence of negative symptoms and their relation to etiology and prognosis more explicit. A dichotomous population is a recurring theme in experimental paradigms. Thus, schizophrenia is defined as process or reactive, deficit or non-deficit and by the presence or absence of affective symptoms. Laboratory tests confirm the clinical impression showing conflicting responses to dexamethasone suppression and clearly defined differences in autonomic responsiveness, but their patho-physiological significance eludes mainstream theory. Added to this is the difficulty in agreeing to what exactly constitutes useful clinical features differentiating, for example, negative symptoms of a true deficit syndrome from features of depression. Two recent papers proposed that the general and specific cognitive features of schizophrenia and major depression result from a monoamine-cholinergic imbalance, the former due to a relative muscarinic receptor hypofunction and the latter, in contrast, to a muscarinic hypersensitivity exacerbated by monoamine depletion. Further development of these ideas will provide pharmacological principles for what is currently an incomplete and largely, descriptive nosology of psychosis. It will propose a dimensional view of affective and negative symptoms based on relative muscarinic integrity and is supported by several exciting intracellular signaling and gene expression studies. Bipolar disorder manifests both muscarinic and dopaminergic hypersensitivity. The greater the imbalance between these two receptor signaling systems, the more the clinical picture will resemble schizophrenia with bizarre, incongruent delusions and increasingly disorganized thought. The capacity for affective expression, by definition a non-deficit syndrome, will remain contingent on the degree of preservation of muscarinic signaling, which itself may be unstable and vary between trait and state examinations. At the extreme end of muscarinic impairment, a deficit schizophrenia subpopulation is proposed with a primary and fixed muscarinic receptor hypofunction.

The genomic profile of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia overlap and both have a common dopaminergic intracellular signaling which is hypersensitive to various stressors. It is proposed that the concomitant muscarinic receptor upregulation differentiates the syndromes, being marked in bipolar disorder and rather less so in schizophrenia. From a behavioral point of view non-deficit syndromes and bipolar disorder appear most proximate and could be reclassified as a spectrum of affective psychosis or schizoaffective disorders. Because of a profound malfunction of the muscarinic receptor, the deficit subgroup cannot express a comparable stress response. None -theless, a convergent principle of psychotic features across psychiatric disorders is a relative monoaminergic-muscarinic imbalance in signal transduction.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of the challenges and implications entailed by deploying mobile clinics in conflict zones to reach populations affected by violence and cut off from health-care services.

This research combines an integrated literature review and an instrumental case study. The literature review comprises two targeted reviews to provide insights: one on conflict zones and one on mobile clinics. The case study describes the process and challenges faced throughout a mobile clinic deployment during and after the Iraq War. The data was gathered using mixed methods over a two-year period (2017–2018).

Armed conflicts directly impact the populations’ health and access to health care. Mobile clinic deployments are often used and recommended to provide health-care access to vulnerable populations cut off from health-care services. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature documenting decision support tools for mobile clinic deployments.

This study highlights the gaps in the literature and provides direction for future research to support the development of valuable insights and decision support tools for practitioners.

The authors investigate how COVID-19 has influenced the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public.

This work covers the first year of COVID-19 in the UK, from March 2020 to March 2021 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. The authors collected and analysed 17.9 million reply tweets to the MPs. The authors present overall abuse levels during different key moments of the pandemic, analysing reactions to MPs by gender and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, the government’s COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.

The authors have found that abuse levels towards UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020. Women (particularly those from non-White backgrounds) receive unusual amounts of abuse, targeting their credibility and capacity to do their jobs. Similar to other large events like general elections and Brexit, COVID-19 has elevated abuse levels, at least temporarily.

Previous studies analysed abuse levels towards MPs in the run-up to the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections and during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The authors compare previous findings with those of the first year of COVID-19, as the pandemic persisted, and Brexit was forthcoming. This research not only contributes to the longitudinal comparison of abuse trends against UK politicians but also presents new findings, corroborates, further clarifies and raises questions about the previous findings.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0392

The Italian sociological scientific community has shown a limited interest in issues related to bisexuality. The purpose of this paper is to fill the knowledge gap on the subject, showing data of an empirical research conducted online on the Italian bisexual community.

The article is based on a mixed methods online survey on Italian bisexual people, which included 218 interviews. The questionnaire was made up of closed and open-ended questions, to investigate their behaviours, habits and lifestyles.

Social pressure and lack of understanding by others sometimes make difficult for bisexual people to show themselves openly for what they are, especially in some contexts, such as the word of work. From a sociological point of view, one can argue that one of the tools when bisexual people face the stigma related to bisexuality is to control, often in an obsessive way, the information they provide about themselves, carefully evaluating the contexts in which they can free themselves and the time when they must expose themselves in line with the expectations of the heteronormative society.

The non-probabilistic sample limits the external validity of the findings. There are also critical elements that characterise social research when transposed online: first, the profiles of the respondents not always are verifiable; second, the digital divide excludes some groups that cannot access the web or involves an over-representation of those who are more familiar with technologies.

The work presented is the first Italian sociological study aimed at deepening the “invisible B” phenomenon of the LGBT acronym in a systematic way. Nowadays bisexuality remains under-researched in social sciences and overall in sociology. Putting “bisexuality” at the centre of the sociological attention appears important to provide serious and scientifically valid data and information useful both to develop the knowledge on this identity category and to contain forms of discrimination and prejudice.