Background: Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century and it can affect mental health either directly through the experience of environmental traumas or indirectly through the experience of emotional distress and anxiety about the future. However, it is not clear what possible subtypes of the emerging “psychoterratic” syndromes such as eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and eco-grief exist, how much distress they may cause, and to what extent they facilitate ecofriendly behavior. Methods: We analyzed semi-structured interviews (N = 17) focusing on the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors related to climate change by using a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative methods. Results and conclusions: The interviews revealed six eco-anxiety components, eight types of eco-guilt, and two types of eco-grief that help to understand the multifactorial nature of these phenomena. The six categories of coping strategies are in line with traditional coping models, and they are linked in various ways to pro-environmental behavior and the management of negative emotions. The results can help practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of emotions related to climate change and how to cope with them, and researchers to develop comprehensive measurement tools to assess these emotions.

Psychoactive drug use shows great diversity, but due to a disproportionate focus on problematic drug use, predominant nonproblematic drug use remains an understudied phenomenon. Historic and anecdotal evidence shows that natural sources of “psychedelic” drugs (e.g., mescaline and psilocybin) have been used in religious and spiritual settings for centuries, as well as for psychological self-enhancement purposes. Our study assessed a total of 667 psychedelic drug users, other drug users, and drug nonusers by online questionnaires. Coping, life purpose, and spirituality were measured with the Psychological Immune Competence Inventory, the Purpose in Life test, and the Intrinsic Spirituality Scale, respectively. Results indicate that the use of psychedelic drugs with a purpose to enhance self-knowledge is less associated with problems, and correlates positively with coping and spirituality. Albeit the meaning of “spirituality” may be ambiguous, it seems that a spiritually-inclined attitude in drug use may act as a protective factor against drug-related problems. The autognostic use of psychedelic drugs may be thus hypothesized as a “training situation” that promotes self-enhancement by rehearsing personal coping strategies and by gaining self-knowledge. However, to assess the actual efficiency and the speculated long-term benefits of these deliberately provoked exceptional experiences, further qualitative investigations are needed.

Background: There is a growing amount of research interest to understand the role of food in well-being. The demand for community supported agriculture (CSA), bringing people spatially, economically, and socially closer to food, is continuously expanding. CSAs play an important role in both sustainable agriculture practices and influencing consumers’ food-related practices, but yet have received little attention in well-being research. Methods: This study explores food-related well-being among CSA members by using an exploratory, qualitative research design and a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews. Results: The findings stress the relevance of psychological, social, and spiritual aspects of food-related well-being beyond the nutritional characteristics of food in CSA. Conclusion: The role of sustainable agriculture in contributing to food-related well-being becomes particularly evident based on consumers’ experiences. These results are important in convincing people that their food-related experiences belong to their perceived well-being as well as stimulating people to elevate their multidimensional expectations in relation to food.

Harm reduction has been increasingly finding its way into public drug policies and healthcare practices worldwide, with successful intervention measures justifiably focussing on the highest-risk groups, such as injecting drug users. However, there are also other types of drug users in need for harm reduction, even though they pose less, low, or no public health risk. Occasionally, drug users may autonomously organise themselves into groups to provide advocacy, harm reduction, and peer-help services, sometimes online. The http://www.daath.hu website has been operated since 2001 by the “Hungarian Psychedelic Community”, an unorganised drug user group with a special interest in hallucinogenic and related substances. As of today, the website serves about 1200 visitors daily, and the online community comprises of more than 8000 registered members. The Daath community is driven by a strong commitment to the policy of harm reduction in the form of various peer-help activities that aim to expand harm reduction without promoting drug use. Our review comprehensively summarises Daath’s user-led harm reduction services and activities from the last ten years, firstly outlining the history and growth phases of Daath, along with its self-set guidelines and policies. Online services (such as a discussion board, and an Ecstasy pill database) and offline activities (such as Ecstasy pill field testing, and a documentary film about psychedelics) are described. In order to extend its harm reduction services and activities in the future, Daath has several social, commercial, and legislative challenges to face. Starting with a need to realign its focus, outlooks for the upcoming operation of Daath are pondered. Future trends in harm reduction, such as separating harm-decreasing from benefit-increasing, are also discussed. We aim to share these innovative harm reduction measures and good practices in order to be critically assessed, and – if found useful – adapted and applied elsewhere.

In central European states, rates of HIV among injection drug users (IDUs) have been low although Hepatitis C (HCV) infection is widespread. The goal of our study was to assess HIV infection, risk perceptions and injecting equipment sharing among IDUs in Budapest, Hungary. Altogether 150 IDUs were interviewed (121 structured interviews between 1999 and 2000 and 29 ethnographic interviews between 2003 and 2004). The majority of them injected heroin (52% and 79%) and many injected amphetamines (51% and 35%). One person tested positive for HIV. Two thirds (68%) shared injecting equipment (syringes, cookers and filters). Some participants said they shared syringes because they were not carrying them for fear of police harassment and that they reused filters as a backup drug supply. In multivariate analysis, sharing of injecting equipment was associated with higher perceived susceptibility to HIV/AIDS, lower self-efficacy for sterile equipment use, higher motivation to comply with peer pressure to use dirty injecting equipment and with having a criminal record. The high levels of injecting risk-behaviors found in this study are a cause for serious concern. Interventions for HIV-prevention need to address not only sharing syringes but also sharing and reusing of other injecting equipment and drug filters.