This chapter zeros in on six pathways to early death: genes and epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences, high-risk health behaviors, autonomic imbalance, hormonal turmoil, and low-grade inflammation. And each one of these pathways may weave through the others, eventually creating a Gordian knot of dysregulations that may be experienced by you as fibromyalgia, depression after a heart attack, or a perplexing and debilitating tremor in your hands and legs. This chapter closes with a summary of what we know about the stress and illness relationship and the key questions we need to study.

How fast or slow does the process of dysregulating the stress response system go before a disease emerges? This chapter builds a model for how this process works over the lifespan. The apparently sudden onset of diabetes or heart disease in our fifties or sixties can often be traced to dysregulations that began years or decades before, invisible to the unsuspecting and asymptomatic. Toxic stress accelerates illness and speeds up aging. How do we know if we’re on a fast track to future illness and early death? And when is the best time to intervene? That depends on how we measure stress. Consider Teresa Langford’s pathways from genes to stress to illness over 53 years.

The chapter sets out the ’big picture’ approach of the book; its concepts, terms and definitions, and the aims and structure of the book.

People with a wide range of mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions are found amongst criminal justice populations, and many present with co-occurring disorders. These may include other neurodevelopmental conditions, substance use disorders or physical health conditions. It is now standard practice to use a pathways approach to organise and deliver services, and journeys taken by many people within criminal justice systems lend themselves to this, at least in theory. Basic requirements of this approach include police custody and prison reception screening, providing organised multidisciplinary care and introducing appropriate interventions as part of individual care plans. There is much we still do not know about vulnerable people in prisons, and service provision remains far from optimal. In particular, insufficient specialist provision means that many people with neurodevelopmental conditions are not identified appropriately, and do not have their needs met as they should. Further, in the absence of support, the presentations of some people render them vulnerable to specific aspects of prison life.

Multiple social, systemic, and structural factors threaten our current food systems. Climate change is pushing us to transform these systems, not only to mitigate its impact but also to ensure food and nutrition security and pursue other ecological, social, political, and economic benefits. Research and innovation have a unique value proposition in the context of food-system transformation. By creating, reorienting, and phasing out aspects of our current research systems, we can realise their potential. We can phase out research institutions, mental models, and incentives that are siloed and that promote top-down silver-bullet thinking. Agricultural research for development can also be reorientated to food system research wherein performance is measured based on benefits to users and the ability to scale rapidly. We can also create spaces and matching incentives to catalyse action, imagine shared futures among stakeholders, and support intergenerational allyship and learning.

The explicit aim of the IPCC is to influence policymaking. By synthesising research on climate change and presenting it to policymakers, the IPCC tries to meet its self-imposed goal of being policy-relevant and policy-neutral, but not policy-prescriptive. The hallmark of the IPCC has been to offer a strong scientific voice demonstrating the necessity of climate policy and action, but without giving firm political advice. Yet scholars have contested the idea of maintaining such a strong boundary between science and policy in the IPCC, questioning whether upholding this boundary has been successful and whether continuing to do so offers a viable way forward. The Paris Agreement provides a new political context for the IPCC, implying a need for solution-oriented assessments. The IPCC itself has also argued that large-scale transformations of society are needed to meet the targets set by the Agreement. To be relevant and influence policymaking in this new political context, the IPCC needs to provide policy advice.

In this chapter I take a deep dive into contemporary examples of EV including its sources and the pathways of EV to people’s lives, as well as the everyday life practices that both produce and are affected by EV. We will see how EV is both produced by everyday life practices, and how it harms or changes everyday life practices: it is both a product and transformer of the contemporary human niche, a recursive linkage. I more fully examine aspects of time, accumulation, and scale. I discuss the mutual emission and dynamism between toxic and nontoxic pollutants, since they are often emitted together, as copollutants. I close the chapter by reviewing the politics of EV and demonstrating why the anthropological ecosystems approach, informed by complex adaptive systems and human niche construction theory, is vital to the process of identifying, tracking, and measuring EV in the Earth system and its impacts on everyday life.

This chapter reviews what is known about the developmental antecedents of adult antisocial personality. It addresses the question of why it is that, while many people may have personality difficulties, a minority develop a severe and persistent dysfunction of personality that is more or less life-long, leading them into a pattern of chronic antisocial behaviour. Findings reviewed in this chapter suggest that the route to adult antisociality is marked by a cascade of developmental roadblocks and insults arising during childhood and adolescence. The authors emphasise the importance of adolescence as a period when things can go seriously awry and personality can deviate from a normal track. They further emphasise the critical importance of substance abuse, particularly the misuse of alcohol, in the genesis of life-course-persistent antisociality. Two possible developmental pathways are described, one predominantly male, the other predominantly female, through which adult antisociality results from adverse circumstances in childhood and adolescence.

The analysis in this chapter emphasises that there can only ever be two places that law, in its present state, can lead embryos to: a woman’s womb, or its own destruction and disposal. Ultimately, this chapter has been developed with a view to answering: how might we use a liminal lens to bring lessons from ‘the gothic’, from conceptualisation to realisation? This chapter addresses the latter in four sections. First, it briefly takes stock of the analysis and ‘lessons’ highlighted by the book so far, before going on to synthesise this analysis, and in doing so, considering the ways in which law can lead embryos out of liminality. Second, it focuses on the roles of persons in embryonic processes in vitro; and Third, it draws out the contours of a context-based approach, including what the approach is not; Finally, it, discusses the potential effects of a context-based approach for the issues (i.e. the contours of the ‘legal gap’) discussed in Part One of this book. It suggests that a context-based approach has the potential to justify affording embryos in vitro different ‘statuses’ depending on the relationally guided and defined pathway on which it is, or onto which it is put.

A student’s hope – their ability to both envision paths to desirable future goals and believe that they will get there – is a powerful force within the school context. In this chapter, I discuss the relevance and utility of hope within the school setting for school psychologists. The chapter begins with an overview of hope theory, including how it is typically measured and its documented relationships with the achievement, academic engagement, mental health, and socioemotional functioning of students. Next, I discuss several ways school psychologists can promote hope schoolwide through various school policies and actions. Lastly, I go over several research-based hope interventions that can be employed in small groups as well as several informal hope-based interventions that can be utilized by school personnel more broadly. There are many ways that hope can be useful to school psychologists. This chapter provides a starter hope toolkit for how it can be leveraged.

The use of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) to set healthcare priorities has been criticized as unfair to people with disabilities that affect their health or lifespan. For instance, because many quality-of-life assessments associate paraplegia with lower quality of life, individuals with paraplegia are assigned lower priority for transplantable organs when those organs are distributed using QALY-based approaches. This consequence of using QALYs to set priorities has prompted a variety of responses. Some have argued that priorities should be set using life-years rather than QALYs. Others have argued that discriminating against people with disabilities is justified.