Sue McNab, Susan Wagstaff and Andy Smith: Everything you wanted to know about family therapy but were too afraid to ask!
"'Have we got a family therapy meeting today?' Why is this question so often accompanied by a sense of dread and anguish when spoken by a teenager? In response to such feedback, we decided to make a radical attempt at reducing the 'groan factor' attached to family therapy with adolescents and to obtain user feedback in a more creative way."
Carol Jenkin: Buddies: an African, Caribbean and shared origin support group
"Nineteen years ago, I suffered a severe bout of depression that affected my life in a dramatic way.......Nineteen years on, armed with numerous certificates and having attended many different courses, I decided to share the techniques I had acquired with others who were suffering in the same way I had been. I set up a group in Bradford called Buddies, which has been going now for five years."
Jane Rayner: Working cross culturally
"I have learned that therapists must begin with the ethical imperative that change begins with 'self', not the 'other.........This is the beginning of a journey which started with an awareness of my own culture and whiteness and which, I hope, leads to cultural sensitivity. Along the way I need to incorporate supervision to remind me of these issues. I also need to try and find a non-threatening way of bringing up the subject of cultural awareness in a busy hospital clinic."
Jill and Ian Palmer: Hair today - gone tomorrow, and crying is allowed
Gary Robinson, Editor of the current issue of Context, writes: "I was very fortunate to have known Ian for almost a year up to his death on the 4 January 2000 aged nineteen and a half years, from leukaemia. This article presents extracts from a book written by Ian and his mother. It covers the period from Ian's diagnosis when he was thirteen years old, through his failed bone marrow transplant, to passing his driving test after his sixteenth birthday. It is a story of tremendous love and inspiration."
Therapeutic stories column
Isobel Reilly: Legacies
"'Experiences, how ever hot they may be when felt, are cooled by the mediating effect of language.' Sluzki, 1991. The transformatory experience of healing is not limited to the therapy room and the privileged exchanges between therapist and patient; it is also to be found in the commonplace and the everyday, in the unplanned and the unexpected."
Gerti Wilford and Rachael Hetherington: Experiences of child care services in Europe
"Whilst parents in England seemed to have to prove that they were bad parents before obtaining help and did not feel that their definition of need was accepted, parents on the continent knew they had an entitlement to help even if they disliked and resented having to make use of this right."
Nita Baker and Bobby Sura: Reviewing a service feedback project in southern Derbyshire
Barry Bowen: The Jersey family therapy service - feedback from families
Jason Fee and Theresa Hendra: Survey of family therapy feedback in Hampshire
Laurence Baldwin and Allan Jones: The reflecting team - client perspectives in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire
The teaching learning column
Zlatka Michova and Sara Barratt: Bulgaria - working on the edge
Previous issues of Context
To view the contents of previous issues of Context magazine click below.
AFT 7 Executive Suite, St James Court, Wilderspool Causeway, Warrington Cheshire WA4 6PS.
Company No. 03018026, Registered Charity No. 1063639