Recent clinical reports have shown an increasing number of patients afflicted by eating disorders in the western world. There are numerous causes and mechanisms leading to eating disorders that affect the psychoneuroendocrinoimmune system. In this study, we define a novel psychoneuroendocrinoimmune nursing approach for anorexic and bulimic patients' treatment. According to the specific diagnostic items deriving from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases, and clinical guidelines in eating disorders formulated by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, we carried out a qualitative study on the nursing treatment chosen by 210 international centers considered as a sample. This study was based on a no structured interview via e-mail to better understand the nursing approach in anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Thanks to the selected centers' answers, four different levels of nursing care were identified, that include: the nursing role analyzing the spectrum of patients' problems; the nursing intervention in inpatient care; the nursing intervention in outpatient care; the day hospital treatment. All four prove to be especially useful in the nursing practice.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore two channels of communication (i.e. texts and images) from a non-governmental organization website called #DisruptAging with the aim of finding how multimodal knowledge dissemination contributes to dismantling misconceptions about the aging process. Design/methodology/approach This analysis is based on an integrated approach that combines corpus-assisted discourse analysis (cf. Semino and Short, 2004; Baker et al., 2008, Baker, 2010) and multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin and Mayr, 2012) via the American Medical Association format (2007) and the suite of FrameWorks tools (2015, 2017), which are applied to the collection of texts and images taken from #DisruptAging. Findings A total of 69 stories corresponding with 218 images of older adults have shown to be powerful textual and semiotic resources, designed both for educational and awareness-raising purposes, to promote the so-called “aging well discourse” (cf. Loos et al., 2017). Social implications This discursive approach to the textual and visual material found in #DisruptAging hopes to influence the governing institutions that we construct, and the people who are given power to run them, with the goal of fostering fair treatment of older people within society. Originality/value There is a lack of studies investigating counter-discourse forms available online, which use textual and visual language to change the way society conceives the idea of aging.

The World Health Organization has estimated that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the fourth most common cause of death worldwide. Due to the economic and social extent of the problem, patient engagement must be comprised as a new resource for the achievement of higher health outcomes and lower costs. As many key processes involved in the COPD patient engagement consist of communication and education processes, modelling those processes in a whole framework, including actors and content needs, is a requirement. The main scope of this chapter is contributing to design such a framework within the Italian Health System. Final recommendations suggest to create a synergy among patient engagement and a set of legal tools, namely informed consent, integrated care and advance care planning. The synergy is based on the fact that both patient engagement and those legal tools have a common deep root in the universal principle of patient autonomy.

This multidisciplinary work mainly uses a discourse analytical approach (Fairclough 1995; Sarangi 2010a, 2010b) and fine tools (i.e., corpora and text analysis software, Baker 2010) in order to identify the possible presence of ageism (Butler 1969) from responses provided by psychologists who completed the Fraboni Scale of Ageism (Fraboni et al. 1990) used in the Italian validation (Donizzetti 2010) and further adapted to achieve the objective of this study. In fact, for each item (Tot=19) distributed along this 3-dimensional model (separation and avoidance; stereotypes and antilocution; affective attitudes and discrimination), 177 respondents were asked to express their (dis)agreement, not with numbers, as in the traditional scale, but with a text (D’Amico et al. 2020). With reference to the above-mentioned dimensions, some results unveiled the psychologists’ recurring belief system as follows: 38% of respondents believed that old people complain much more than other people, thus confirming their idea of a separate group from theirs; 35.7% thought that the elderly should be entrusted with the care of infants only when supervised, thus fitting the stereotype of the fixed age-identity category; and 80.6 % declared that they were unwilling to reciprocate if an old person initiated a conversation for external and/or context/personality-dependent reasons, thus justifying their discriminatory attitudes. Limited but not negligible results demonstrate a need for mental health education and training to be monitored in order to better understand the professionals’ belief system that emerges from their discourse on old age, because the reiteration of the same belief system, if cemented in social memory, has the strong effect of conferring an aura of objectivity to prevailing attitudes towards old(er) adults, and of inevitably affecting standard professional inter/actions with them.

Non sono molti gli studi e le ricerche sull'ageismo in Italia e limitate sono anche le casistiche. Eppure, l'aumento della popolazione anziana è un dato costante nel nostro paese, come in Europa e in tutto l'occidente industrialmente avanzato. Gli esperti di psicogeriatria, o coloro che tra gli psicologi scelgono di occuparsi a livello valutativo, clinico, assistenziale, trattamentale, terapeutico, di soggetti in età geriatrica, sono una netta minoranza, rispetto ad aree, bisogni, fasce di età, maggiormente frequentati dai professionisti della salute mentale (si pensi alla età evolutiva, all'adolescenza, o alla età adulta). Eppure, l'aumento notevole dei soggetti anziani comporta la presenza di bisogni di salute, anche e soprattutto psicologica, fino ad ora poco considerati e per questo i professionisti della salute e del benessere mentale sono chiamati a fare uno sforzo per riconoscerli e per poter poi calibrare i loro interventi clinici, assistenziali e terapeutici. L'ageismo, cioè il pregiudizio nei confronti di soggetti in età geriatrica, può caratterizzare anche gli operatori dell'area sociosanitaria, tra cui gli psicologi. Il presente lavoro fa parte di un progetto di ricerca molto più ampio, ancora in fase di implementazione, e vuole rappresentare un iniziale contributo di ricerca di letteratura sul tema ageismo e psicologi.