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Characteristics and Quality of Life Among People Living with HIV at Drop-in Centres and Shelter Homes in Malaysia

SIAH, P C
TAN, J H
2014

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Purpose: The aim of the study was to examine whether there are any significant differences in demographic characteristics and health-related Quality of Life (QoL) among people living with HIV (PLWH) at shelter homes and drop-in centres in Malaysia.

 

Method: 117 PLWH were recruited by using the purposive sampling method. Data were collected through a questionnaire survey.

 

Results: Significant differences were found between PLWH at shelter homes and drop-in centres, in their demographic characteristics and in the 3 factors in the HIV/AIDS-Targeted Quality of Life Instruments (HAT-QoL) – namely, overall function, health worries, and provider trust.

 

Conclusion: Due to the differences in characteristics and QoL among PLWH in these two settings, different approaches are suggested to assist PLWH from shelter homes and drop-in centres.

Applied research on disability in Africa : general mapping

INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION OF APPLIED DISABILITY RESEARCH (FIRAH)
2014

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“The goal of this literary review is to report on existing knowledge about applied research on the African continent, regarding the living conditions of people with disabilities, poverty, violence and sexual abuse especially regarding children and women with disabilities, community-based rehabilitation and employment”

Does Africa dream of androids?

OKOYE, Florence
2014

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This paper is part of a broader investigation into the intersection of disability and technology in African societies. The paper will focus specifically on Nigerian cultures, exploring the social experience of disabled persons with respect to their use of available technologies in navigating a space within their respective cultures. The paper will first deal with the technologies available to disabled people in pre-colonial West Africa as suggested by archaeological and literary evidence, go on to analyse how changes in economic and cultural systems brought about by colonialism and the post-colonial state, shifted the roles and technologies available to disabled people. The paper argues that the African cyborg has been an inspiration for new technologies, and an agent of technological and social change. Simultaneously, increased connectivity has enabled indigenous technologists to more quickly share and develop ideas. It has also empowered new generations of technologists with the potential to radically improve disabled access to areas of public life. The paper concludes that as a focus of metaphysical anxieties, the cyborg has evolved to something approximating the New African, someone who can defy boundaries to achieve an act worthy of herself and the her community – an agent of revolution and social change rather than a passive recipient of imposed technologies.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1

Performing the Stare in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

CHATTOPADHYAY, Sagarika
NAYAK, Amarjeet
2014

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This article intends to explore the materiality of disability through the notions of staring and bodies, as existing in the case of disability. The dynamic interactions that flow back and forth between the starer and the staree are inverted as the scales of who is staring and who is stared at are occasionally found to be at crossroads with the colonial or masculine gaze. This problematises the stare and its valorization within the field of disability as well as its valence with other kinds of gazes. This article shows how the ‘disabled’ person does not depend upon the able in conferring meaning upon itself in a society saturated with assumptions of ableism and that claims to own the power over the other in exercising the stare, demanding a story, and using language to assert itself. It raises questions around what disability is about and its notional creation in an able society. A slip often occurs from notional disablism to a notional ableism, with both categories being the subjects of a cultural construction. And this slip indicates the liminal space that disabled subjects often occupy while performing acts in their everyday life. The setting for this article is the powerful novel of Animal’s People and its intrepid hero Animal whose life is explored in a search of some answers to the questions raised here.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1

Passive-Aggressive: Māori Resistance and the Continuance of Colonial Psychiatry in Aotearoa New Zealand

COHENA, Bruce M Z
2014

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This article offers a comparative discussion on the encroachment of psychiatric imperialism in the Global South through considering the continuance of western psychiatry in a colonized part of the Global North. Whereas the Indigenous population of Aotearoa New Zealand were considered mentally healthier prior to the 1950s, current statistics show that Māori are much more likely to experience a ‘mental illness’ and be admitted to psychiatric hospital compared to settler groups. A review of the literature highlights socio-economic variables and ‘acculturation’ issues as key to understanding the difference in prevalence rates. However, utilizing a ‘critical model’, influenced by writings on colonial psychiatry and race, it is demonstrated in this discussion that a crisis in colonial hegemony between the 1960s and 1980s led to an increased need for colonial psychiatry to pathologize a politically conscious Māori population. As the first academic article to attempt such a critical de-construction of psychiatric practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is recommended that future research is re-orientated towards a focus on the psychiatric institution, and the institution of psychiatry, as a site of colonial power and social control.

 

Disability and the Global South, 2014, Vol. 1 No. 2

Neurasthenia Revisited: Psychologising precarious labor and migrant status in contemporary discourses of Asian American nervousness

TAM, Louise
2014

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Neurasthenia—a term first coined by American neurologist George M. Beard in the 1860s—was a ‘malady of civilization’ associated with cerebral overpressure from the stresses of modern industrial life (Rabinbach, 1992:154). Many scholars of neurasthenia assume this psychopathological ‘disease of the will’ was a white disease that disappeared from Western medical practice since the early twentieth century. However, in this paper, I argue that not only has neurasthenia traveled to non-Western contexts, but that its genealogy as a culture-bound syndrome continues to haunt the present in North American cross-cultural counselling. Through a textual analysis of multicultural psychology textbooks published over the last decade, I argue these ‘traits’ serve to sequester problems of oppression into the private, apolitical space of family and culture, renarrativizing experiences of racial profiling, classroom segregation, worker disablement, and poverty as culturally determined mental health problems.

 

Disability and the Global South, 2014, Vol. 1 No. 2

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