Editorial Deliberate and accidental self-harm. One of the great privileges of editing a journal is seeing how, through the peer review process, a journal issue often develops a subject theme without much help from the editorial staff. This issue contains three stark papers on a topical area of medicine – psychiatry – and particularly the areas of addiction, suicide and death. The incidence of s...

Preliminary analysis of data collected from trained expert facilitators of ad hoc creative teams suggests that complex analytical techniques such as costed function modeling and decision criteria matrix may have far more impact upon a team's creative effectiveness than frequently researched measures such as idea quantity. An intriguing relationship in these data between complex creativity and t...

Self-harm of the skin is a complex problem encountered mainly in adolescents and young adults. The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of deliberate cutaneous self-harm without suicidal intent among secondary school teenagers of the Lodz region. A self-administered specially designed anonymous questionnaire was delivered to 1,448 secondary school teenagers, aged 12-19 years. The lifet...

This study investigated whether crisis intervention (CI) at the General Hospital is a suitable management strategy among borderline patients referred to the emergency room (ER) for deliberate self-harm. Two patient cohorts (n=200) meeting DSM-IV Borderline Personality Disorder criteria, were prospectively assessed for repeated deliberate self-harm and service consumption. At ER discharge, 100 s...

Individuals who engage in deliberate self-harm (DSH) report using other problematic coping mechanisms. One potential problematic coping mechanism is alcohol consumption. Research on alcohol involvement and deliberate self-harm is conflicting. This study compared individuals who have engaged in deliberate self-harm to controls on a range of alcohol measures. Five hundred females completed questi...

This paper describes an investigation of the phenomenon of mental pollution in a sample of 50 female victims of sexual assault. Feelings of mental pollution were assessed using an interview and a questionnaire. An experimental procedure was employed to determine if feelings of dirtiness and the urge to wash could be provoked by deliberate attention to the assault memory. Thirty (60%) of the 50 ...

This prospective study was aimed to analyze the nature of and the factors associated with deliberate self-poisoning in children below the age of 12 years. Children referred to the Child Guidance Clinic for evaluation after recovery from the effects of poisoning during the five-year period between 1999 and 2003 formed the subjects of the study. The children were evaluated for stress factors, psy...

We investigated movement differences between deliberately posed and spontaneously occurring smiles and eyebrow raises during a videotaped interview that included a facial movement assessment. Using automated facial image analysis, we quantified lip corner and eyebrow movement during periods of visible smiles and eyebrow raises and compared facial movement within participants. As in an earlier s...

Many scholars have argued that deliberate birth spacing may have played a role before and during the modern fertility transition. There are good historical and theoretical reasons for this view, but it has proved to be hard to demonstrate convincingly that birth intervals were in fact partly determined by attempts at deliberate fertility control. This paper suggests a method of securing evidenc...

Vaccination is a deliberate attempt to protect humans against disease and while there are some who suggest such methods began with the Hindus in 1000 B.C. it was Edward Jenner's work with cowpox vaccination in the 1790's that is recognised as the first attempt to control an infectious disease by a deliberate inoculation.(1) Jenner's intention was to prevent smallpox by injecting material from a...