Suchergebnisse

AbstractPolitics is a major player in health, sickness, and death affairs. This article reviews the role of politics in public health and its impact on health outcomes, mortality ratios, and death scenarios amongst the most vulnerable populations. Furthermore, the article explains the reasons behind the absence of politics from health and public health discourses; and examines the role of politics during the mis/management of COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on Foucault's biopower, Mebmbe's necropolitics, and Butler's precarity, the article illuminates how public health policies are highly political insofar as they offer some individuals access to life but create possibilities of death for others. During COVID‐19, politics enabled governors to put at risk the most vulnerable groups, the precariat, namely refugees, asylum seekers, stateless, and immigrants, the majority of whom were impoverished. The article presents COVID‐19 as an example of a crisis that unmasks these politics, claiming that these politics are not new but rather a continuum of previous invisible policies that COVID‐19 unmasked and intensified. The article describes how the politics of health entail privileging individuals with capital value who can benefit the state's interests and maintains its power.

During the late 1960s, Israel had a policy of withholding Palestinian corpses in secret cemeteries, in which each corpse was designated by a number, called the 'secret cemeteries of numbers'. During the last Palestinian 'al-Quds [Jerusalem] uprising' in October 2015, Israel again began withholding killed Palestinians' bodies, this time storing them in refrigerators. Tens of families experienced the detention and release of the frozen dead body of their relative. Drawing on 19 semi-structured interviews with families from al-Khalil (Hebron), this article traces Israel's political use of Palestinian bodies to dismantle Palestinian collectivity, and the Palestinians' use of the same bodies to rebuild their national collectivism. This article also describes Israel's use of its necropolitical and biopolitical powers to manage the Palestinian death, and the resistance strategies used by Palestinian families to oppose these powers. This study argues that necropolitics includes the coloniser's management of the colonised grief and bereavement, and the decisions about how, when, where and with whom the colonised should die. That is, it is the power to manage the structure and process of 'letting die' and being dead.

This article aims to shed light on the post-mortem practices for
Palestinian dead bodies when there is suspicion of human rights violations by
Israeli military forces. By focusing on the case of Omran Abu Hamdieh from
Al-Khalil (Hebron), the article explores the interactions between Palestinian
social-institutional agents, Israeli military forces and international
medico-legal agents. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, the article
explores how the intersectionality between the various controlling powers is
inscribed over the Palestinian dead bodies and structures their death rites. The
article claims that inviting foreign medico-legal experts in the Palestinian
context could reveal the true death story and the human rights violations, but
also reaffirms the sovereignty of the Israeli military forces over the
Palestinian dead and lived bodies.

Care for persons with dementia in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is undertaken predominantly by family members, domestic workers, and private nurses within the home. Domestic caregivers possess different understandings and varying degrees of knowledge of dementia that are influenced by complex socio-cultural and religious factors. With much of the burden falling on the shoulders of "invisible" caregivers, the role and needs of these individuals require deeper scrutiny. The purpose of this scoping review was to examine the empirical studies published on caring for persons with dementia in Arab countries of the MENA region. Using a systematic review technique, searches were conducted on PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar using database-specific terms associated with caregiving, dementia, aging, and the MENA region. To ensure local and regional research was captured, hand searches of regional journals, reference lists of included articles, and Arabic databases Al-Manhal and e-Marefa were also searched. No date restrictions were imposed. Twenty studies met inclusion criteria and the following themes were identified: caregiving experiences and the burden of care; barriers to caregiving; and caregiver recommendations to improve care. Results demonstrate that studies about informal caregivers and dementia within Arab-Muslim populations are underrepresented in the research. This review highlights the paucity of literature on service users' experiences and underscores the need for future research specific to dementia care within the Arab-Islamic sociocultural context. These trajectories are especially pertinent given the unprecedented aging demographics of the MENA populations.

Background: The majority of research attention has been devoted to the link between religiosity and suicide risk, and a considerable amount of studies has been carried out on how stigma impacts individuals with mental health problems of different kinds. However, the interplay between religiosity, suicide literacy and suicide stigma has seldom been empirically researched, especially quantitatively. We sought through this study to redress the imbalance of research attention by examining the relationship between religiosity and suicide stigma; and the indirect and moderating effects of suicide literacy on this relationship. Method: A cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted among Arab-Muslim adults originating from four Arab countries (Egypt: N = 1029, Kuwait: N = 2182, Lebanon N = 781, Tunisia N = 2343; Total sample: N = 6335). The outcome measures included the Arabic Religiosity Scale which taps into variation in the degree of religiosity, the Stigma of Suicide Scale-short form to the solicit degree of stigma related to suicide, and the Literacy of Suicide Scale explores knowledge and understanding of suicide. Results: Our Mediation analyses findings showed that literacy of suicide partially mediated the association between religiosity and stigmatizing attitude toward suicide. Higher religiosity was significantly associated with less literacy of suicide; higher literacy of suicide was significantly associated with less stigma of suicide. Finally, higher religiosity was directly and significantly associated with more stigmatization attitude toward suicide. Conclusion: We contribute the literature by showing, for the first time, that suicide literacy plays a mediating role in the association between religiosity and suicide stigma in a sample of Arab-Muslim community adults. This preliminarily suggests that the effects of religiosity on suicide stigma can be modifiable through improving suicide literacy. This implies that interventions targeting highly religious individuals should pay dual attention to increasing suicide literacy and lowering suicide stigma.