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The need for support for good mental health is enormous. General support for good mental health is needed for 100% of the population, and at all stages of life, from early childhood to end of life. Focused support is needed for the 17.6% of adults who have a mental disorder at any time, including those who also have a mental health problem amongst the 30% who report having a long-term condition of some kind. All sectors of society and all parts of the NHS need to play their part. Primary care cannot do this on its own. This paper describes how primary care practitioners can help stimulate such a grand alliance for health, by operating at four different levels – as individual practitioners, as organisations, as geographic clusters of organisations and as policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This review systematically examines the literature exploring comprehension of a verbally presented police caution and the suggested factors influencing this, amongst adults within the criminal justice system. An electronic literature search returned 438 titles, with screening leaving 13 articles considered appropriate for the review question. The majority of these were USA studies, with two UK and two Canadian studies. Heterogeneous study methodologies permit only a narrative approach to pooling the data. Findings indicate that a considerable proportion of this population have difficulty fully understanding the caution. Higher IQs and verbal comprehension are positively associated with performance. The studies also indicate that some factors that may appear intuitively related to comprehension, such as prior caution exposure, education, age and mental health, may not be linked to performance. The literature generally used broad inclusion criteria, which increased potential for confounders and reduced opportunity to draw out probable predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the impact of family disruption in childhood on transitions made in young adult life. As a direct consequence of the rise in divorce, more and more children spend part of their lives in lone-parent families. For example, in 1971 lone-mother families resulting from marital breakdown represented four per cent of all British families with dependent children, compared with nine per cent in 1988. Where the lone parent remarries or begins to cohabit, children additionally spend part of their childhood in reconstituted families. The main objective of this study is to investigate whether the timing of transitions during young adult life varies for children from differing family settings. As young people move through their teens into their twenties, they frequently begin to make a number of key transitions: they finish full-time education, enter the labour market, leave home, establish independent households, find a partner, marry, and become parents. Three national cohort studies of children born in different decades have been carried out in Great Britain: 1946, 1958 and 1970. In each of these longitudinal studies a complete sample of one week's births was taken for the original study, in which the focus was mainly medical. The two more recent ones were primarily designed as studies of perinatal mortality; the oldest began as a study of maternity.

From a longitudinal survey of a British cohort born in 1958 this study finds that, by age 33, off-spring of parents who divorced are more likely to have dissolved their first partnerships. This finding persists after taking into account age at first partnership, type of first partnership (marital, pre-marital cohabiting union, and cohabiting union), and indicators of class background and childhood and adolescent school achievement and behaviour problems. Some of these factors are associated with partnership dissolution in their own right, but the association between parental divorce and second generation partnership dissolution is largely independent of them. Demographic factors, including type of and age at first partnership, were important links between parental divorce and partnership dissolution. Moreover, the estimated effects of parental divorce were substantially reduced when the demographic variables were taken into account, suggesting that cohabitation and early partnership may be important pathways through which a parental divorce, or the unmeasured characteristics correlated with it, affect partnership dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]