Reparations for people living with dementia: Recognition, accountability, change, now!

There is a significant and longstanding problem of harm to people living with dementia in long term care institutions ('LTC institutions', referred to by others as 'care homes', 'nursing homes', 'long term care', 'residential aged care facilities'), along with a failure to redress the harm or hold people accountable for this harm. This article reports on an Australian project that found reparations must be a response to harm to people living with dementia in residential aged care. Using a disability human rights methodology, focus groups were conducted with people living with dementia, care partners and family members, advocates and lawyers to explore perspectives on why and how to redress harm to people living with dementia in Australian LTC institutions. Researchers found four key themes provide the basis for the necessity and design of a reparative approach to redress - recognition, accountability, change, now. The article calls for further attention to reparations in dementia scholarship, with a particular focus on the role that can be played in the delivery of reparations by the LTC industry, dementia practitioners, and dementia scholars. Ultimately, this article provides a new understanding of responses to violence, abuse, neglect and other harms experienced by people living with dementia in LTC institutions, which centres justice, rights, and transformative change.

Structural Problems Demand Structural Solutions: Addressing Domestic and Family Violence.

Despite the global recognition of domestic and family violence (DFV) as an outcome of unequal power relations between men and women, dominant frameworks for addressing DFV do not target the structural nature of the problem. Drawing on research conducted in partnership with the Federation of Community Legal Centres in Australia, we argue that a distinction needs to be made between what is genuinely structural change and what is system reform. Using intersectional feminist and decolonial theory and praxis, we reflect on what a structural approach to DFV could look like: one that confronts and actively tries to change the structural conditions that give rise to women's individual and collective vulnerability and victimization.

Heart rate variability, prefrontal neural function, and cognitive performance: the neurovisceral integration perspective on self-regulation, adaptation, and health.

BACKGROUND: In the present paper, we describe a model of neurovisceral integration in which a set of neural structures involved in cognitive, affective, and autonomic regulation are related to heart rate variability (HRV) and cognitive performance. METHODS: We detail the pathways involved in the neural regulation of the cardiovascular system and provide pharmacological and neuroimaging data in support of the neural structures linking the central nervous system to HRV in humans. We review a number of studies from our group showing that individual differences in HRV are related to performance on tasks associated with executive function and prefrontal cortical activity. These studies include comparisons of executive- and nonexecutive-function tasks in healthy participants, in both threatening and nonthreatening conditions. In addition, we show that manipulating resting HRV levels is associated with changes in performance on executive-function tasks. We also examine the relationship between HRV and cognitive performance in ecologically valid situations using a police shooting simulation and a naval navigation simulation. Finally, we review our studies in anxiety patients, as well as studies examining psychopathy. CONCLUSION: These findings in total suggest an important relationship among cognitive performance, HRV, and prefrontal neural function that has important implications for both physical and mental health. Future studies are needed to determine exactly which executive functions are associated with individual differences in HRV in a wider range of situations and populations.