BACKGROUND The association between food insecurity and mental health is established. Increasingly, associations between drought and mental health and drought and food insecurity have been observed in a number of countries. The impact of drought on the association between food insecurity and mental health has received little attention. METHODS Population-based study using data from a nationall...

Stigma is a powerful determinant of physical and mental health around the world, a perennial public health concern that is particularly resistant to change. This article builds from sociologist Erving Goffman's classic conception of stigma as a unitary social phenomenon to explore the stigma attached to two seemingly dissimilar conditions: food insecurity in rural Brazil, and obesity in the urb...

Indonesia has been afflicted by an economic crisis since July 1997. The economic crisis was preceded by a long drought associated with El Nino. The result has been a decline in food production, especially rice. In the eastern part of the country, especially in Irian Jaya, there was food insecurity during the early stages of the economic crisis. When the crisis escalated to become an economic, s...

reports the federal government’s newest estimate of Oregon’s household food insecurity rate. Oregon’s unexpected ranking as one of the “hungriest” states in the late 1990s embarrassed state political leaders and mystified researchers. Its subsequent improvement in the early 2000s was the source of some pride among advocates and social service agency leaders. Its recent increase during the curre...

The development in the last decade of methodology for measuring and scaling household food insecurity and hunger in U.S. populations makes possible systematic examination of the ways in which hunger and food insecurity affect individuals and families. The impact on children has always been of primary concern for policy, advocacy, and science because of the vulnerability of children to long-term...

The socio-economic crisis affects mental health in two mutually sustaining ways: First, it undermines the protective factors contributing to and sustaining development; and second, it increases and enhances the risk factors for the emergence of mental disorders. Situations of the current reality that fall into the above categories include: employment insecurity, income instability, unemployment...

New results from control theory allow construction of necessary conditions statistical models of body mass regulation in the context of interaction with a complex dynamic environment. Focusing on the stressrelated induction of central obesity via failure of HPA axis regulation, we explore implications for strategies of prevention and treatment. It rapidly becomes evident that individual-centere...

Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between “societal health” and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for p...