Vacant [Adult Version]

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The Telegraph published a guide to all 34 characters. Rowling first had the idea on an aeroplane to the United States, whilst on tour for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Referring to the original conception of the Harry Potter series on a train from Manchester to London, Rowling said "Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea.

This time I was on a plane. And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It's a rush of adrenaline , it's chemical.

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I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that's how I know. Rowling's movement from children's literature to adult literature arose from being "ready to change genre". You don't have sex near unicorns. It's an ironclad rule. I was always, I think, completely honest. I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write. Rowling rejected Little, Brown's claims that the book was a " black comedy ", saying in an interview with The New Yorker , "It's been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it's more of a comic tragedy.

For two years, the working title of the novel was Responsible , until Rowling picked up Charles Arnold-Baker 's work on local government, Local Council Administration , whilst looking something up and came across the term " casual vacancy. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: The Casual Vacancy features a range of social issues , including rape, racism, heroin and marijuana use, pornography, domestic abuse , child abuse , self-harm and suicide. Sukhvinder Jawanda is often berated by her mother, Parminder, and will resort to self-harm.

Andrew Price, along with his brother Paul, suffer child abuse from their father Simon Price during the novel. The New Yorker questioned Rowling whether this represented her difficult childhood and relationship with her father, Rowling replied "Andrew's romantic idea that he'll go and live among the graffiti and broken windows of London—that was me. I thought, I have to get away from this place.

So all of my energies went into that. One of the novel's major themes is politics. The Guardian referred to The Casual Vacancy as a "parable of national politics", with Rowling saying, "I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society, We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?

But it's not a 'little bit' when you're in that situation. Even a tenner a week can make such a vast, vast difference. So, yeah, it does feel familiar. Though I started writing this five years ago when we didn't have a coalition government, so it's become maybe more relevant as I've written. Rowling has commented on her economic situation before the success of Harry Potter as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless" [9] [11] and said that this was why she was drawn to writing about poverty.

How many of us are able to expand our minds beyond our own personal experience? So many people, certainly people who sit around the cabinet table, say, 'Well, it worked for me' or, 'This is how my father managed it' — these trite catchphrases — and the idea that other people might have had such a different life experience that their choices and beliefs and behaviours would be completely different from your own seems to escape a lot of otherwise intelligent people.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people. Rowling, The Guardian , "The worst that can happen is everyone says, That's shockingly bad", She said "I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I'm proud of it, and that counts for me. And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, 'Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids' and I can take that. So, yeah, I'll put it out there, and if everyone says, 'Well, that's shockingly bad—back to wizards with you', then obviously I won't be throwing a party.

But I will live. When released, The Casual Vacancy received mixed reviews. Lev Grossman for Time wrote in a positive review, "It's a big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, deeply upsetting and magnificently eloquent novel of contemporary England, rich with literary intelligence and entirely bereft of bullshit.

Rowling; and that's pretty good. It plays to her strengths as a storyteller.

Both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking individuals 18 years and older were administered the survey in the language of their choice; only 2 Spanish-language surveys were administered. Based on the American Association for Public Opinion Research response rate calculator, our survey response rate was At each interview, participants responded to questions about their perceptions of mental health, focusing on their experiences within the past 30 days to anchor responses in time relative to the intervention period and to avoid telescoping and overestimation.

We used the validated short-form Kessler-6 Psychological Distress Scale K6 , a widely used community screening tool. The K6 was designed to evaluate the prevalence of serious mental illness in the community and does not make a clinical diagnosis of mental illness.

Participants were asked to indicate how often they felt nervous, hopeless, restless, depressed, that everything was an effort, and worthless using the following scale: In keeping with the K6 order and scoring, the 2 middle categories were combined to create a score of 0 to 4 for each marker, which was then summed for a total score of 0 to Using standard scoring guidelines, a score of 13 or greater indicated higher prevalence of serious mental illness or what we call self-reported poor mental health.

Prior to the study, sample size was determined by taking into account anticipated intracluster correlation, participant response prevalence, number of crimes reported to the police in each area, effect size, and power. Intention-to-treat analyses of participants were conducted according to the randomly assigned vacant lot cluster intervention group in which they lived. Pairwise comparisons were completed for all study outcomes between the greening intervention group and the no intervention group as well as the trash cleanup intervention group and the no intervention group.

Random-effects regressions were chosen because we assumed that unobserved lot-specific effects were correlated over time at the cluster level. All statistical analyses were conducted using Stata, version Difference-in-differences analyses were calculated as interaction terms of intervention-control differences multiplied by pre-post differences. These difference-in-differences interaction terms were the primary independent variables of interest interpreted as the true effect of the interventions on the outcomes studied.

The estimates from the difference-in-differences analysis were then divided by the overall magnitude of occurrence for each outcome in the intervention group to obtain percentage reductions. Ineligible lots were excluded owing to insufficient blight or not being abandoned , being greater than sq ft , and being existing private or commercial parking lots A total of clusters containing vacant lots were enrolled in the trial and randomly allocated to the following 1 of 3 study arms: Of the clusters, 47 Balance was evident at the cluster level between the 3 intervention conditions in terms of total number of study lots per study arm range, lots , the mean number of study lots per cluster range, 4.

A total of participants were interviewed during the preintervention period, and This amounted to a Of the participants, Of the participants included in the analysis, A total of people Participant demographic characteristics were balanced between the 3 study arms, including mean tenure in the home range, Intention-to-treat analyses demonstrated significant changes in participant-reported mental health outcomes.

There was no significant difference in self-reported poor mental health in neighborhoods below the poverty line. Intention-to-treat analyses of the trash cleanup intervention compared with no intervention did not show any statistically significant differences between self-reported poor mental health measured by the K6 Table 2.

There was also no difference between groups for the individual components of the K6.

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The analysis of neighborhoods below the poverty line also did not indicate any difference in self-reported mental health between the groups. In this citywide cluster randomized trial of 2 vacant land remediation interventions, greening was associated with a significant reduction in feeling depressed and worthless as well as a nonsignificant reduction in overall self-reported poor mental health for randomly sampled residents living nearby. The trash cleanup intervention was not associated with a reduction in feeling depressed or self-reported poor mental health.

To our knowledge, this is the first citywide cluster randomized trial of actual place-based changes to urban spaces. These results add much needed experimental evidence to a growing body of literature calling for structural changes to neighborhoods as a method for improving health and safety. Our findings indicate that the effect of vacant lot greening on feeling depressed was slightly stronger for those living in neighborhoods below the poverty line.

Making structural changes to the lowest-resource neighborhoods can make them healthier and may be an important mechanism to address persistent and entrenched socioeconomic health disparities. There are several possible mechanisms through which the vacant lot greening intervention but not the trash cleanup intervention improved feeling depressed and self-reported poor mental health.

One significant difference between the 2 interventions was the creation of new green space. Green space, particularly in urban environments more likely to have a dearth of vegetation, has been linked to recovery from mental fatigue, 46 a state of inattentiveness and irritability resulting from the information-processing demands of daily life. Spending time in or near nature can combat mental fatigue because it allows engagement without paying explicit attention.

For example, walking past green space has been associated with reduction in heart rate, 12 one marker of acute physiological stress.

Additionally, the presence of green space is associated with improved neighborhood social milieu, including the concepts of social cohesion, social capital, and collective efficacy. The other significant difference between the greening and trash cleanup interventions was the presence of a simple wooden post and rail fence.

Positions Vacant

The fence delineates the newly greened space as one that is cared for but does have openings to indicate that people can enter the space. The fence is also meant to deter illegal dumping. Previous qualitative work conducted by our team indicated that vacant land causes people to feel stigmatized and abandoned by their community and government. There were several limitations to this study. We used the K6 to measure our outcome of interest and mental health. While this is a validated and widely used scale, it is still a single scale, and other mental illness screening and diagnosis tools and scales may produce different results.

Furthermore, we did not conduct a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition —level diagnosis of mental illness but rather used a community screening tool. Another limitation is the duration of our study and loss to follow-up. We followed up people for 18 months following the blight remediation interventions and are unable to know if the effect of the interventions on mental health outcomes persisted past the study period.

We also made every effort to minimize loss to follow-up of our study participants after they were first enrolled, although differential, nonrandom dropout in our 3 study arms and across all study waves could have affected our results. Finally, we did not specifically track if and how study participants used or did not use study vacant lots, although prior work has demonstrated signs of use, such as barbeques or chairs on similar vacant lots. Among community-dwelling adults, self-reported feelings of depression and worthlessness were significantly decreased and self-reported poor mental health was nonsignificantly reduced for those living near greened vacant lots compared with control lots.

The treatment of dilapidated physical environments can be an important tool for communities to address persistent mental health problems. These findings provide support to health care clinicians concerned with positively transforming the often chaotic and harmful environments that affect their patients. Our findings also offer evidence to policy makers interested in increasing municipal investments in the remediation of blighted urban spaces as an inexpensive 29 and scalable way to improve mental health, particularly in low-resource neighborhoods.

This article was corrected on August 17, , to fix an error in Figure 2B. Drs MacDonald and Branas had full access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: Hohl, Kondo, MacDonald, Branas.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Hohl reported receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported. The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication. These individuals were affiliated with this project and key to its success.

Mr Levenson received compensation for his field work. Home Issues Specialties For Authors. Vacant Lot Main Greening Intervention. The state of US health, Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States: Accessed November 13, Costs and outcomes of mental health and substance use disorders in the US. Neighborhood stressors and social support as predictors of depressive symptoms in the Chicago Community Adult Health Study.

Stressful neighborhoods and depression: J Health Soc Behav. Neighborhood disorder, psychophysiological distress, and health. Are neighbourhood characteristics associated with depressive symptoms? These were difficult notions of 'village life' — the junkies, the domestic abusers, the shark-like property developers, the upwardly mobiles, [and] the downwardly spiralling". She summarised that "It must be quite exhausting to feel From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Archived from the original on 12 April Retrieved 23 April Announces Expanded Creative Partnership with J. Retrieved 12 September Retrieved 28 January Retrieved 6 June Retrieved 3 September Stroud News and Journal. Retrieved 25 February Retrieved 16 February The Casual Vacancy is as entertaining as it is realistic".

After the Thrones Angry Boys Animals. The Casual Vacancy The Crimes of Grindelwald , also wrote. The Casual Vacancy Strike —present.

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