Concentric circles of containment: a psychodynamic contribution to working in pupil referral units

This article aims to reflect on the lessons learnt from using a psychodynamic approach to offering onsite therapeutic child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in four pupil referral units (henceforth referred to as PRUs). The PRUs cater for six- to 16-year-old children and adolescents permanently excluded from mainstream schools. The work takes place in an inner London borough. The approach described evolved over five years through practice-based evidence of what worked well in each particular setting. This was viewed both in terms of sustaining families' engagement in the therapeutic process, and also effectively supporting child and adolescent mental health services and education staff in their respective tasks. The model which gradually evolved owes much to Bion's concept of containment as the necessary foundation for emotional growth and genuine learning. It also draws on ideas from psychoanalytic consultation and open systems theory. The importance of work discussion groups in this setting will also be evident. Some links are made to relevant Buddhist concepts and metaphors.     

Joining up with ‘not us’ staff to run adolescent groups in schools

The author describes the development of a model for working with staff members from non-psychoanalytic backgrounds to run therapeutic and therapy-like pupil groups in schools. She draws on her experience of co-facilitating groups at a London-based secondary school and uses examples from recent group work with Year 10 pupils (aged 14–15). Child psychotherapists who have shied away either from doing group work in general, or more specifically taking on group work in schools, may be encouraged to see that the underlying principles are essentially no different from those of individual therapy. Worrying and troublesome young people tend to have difficulties in their external relationships, often exhibited at school and contributing to their underachievement. Psychoanalytically informed groups such as the kind portrayed here can address this difficulty by offering a safe setting for interactions with other group participants and with the leaders to be observed, examined and challenged in the here and now. Attention is paid to primitive anxieties and the defences employed to keep them at bay, including the tendency to place individual needs before group needs when sense of self and sometimes survival itself are felt to be threatened. The aim is for participants to learn about themselves by sharing a group experience and, if successful, integrate some conflicting aspects of themselves. This model for doing group work demonstrates how child psychotherapists can make a unique and valuable contribution, provided the school environment is conducive and there is a member of staff who is open to learning a new way of working.     

Physical self-perceptions and self-esteem in adolescents participating in organized sports and religious groups

Drawing on the exercise and self-esteem model (EXSEM), the current study examined associations between sport activities and aspects of the self-system among adolescent members of sport groups. Youths attending religious groups were included in the study to allow for a test of generalization. Participants were 595 adolescents (sport groups: n = 355, M_age = 15.09 years, SD = 1.49, 54.6% female; religious groups: n = 240, M_age = 15.67 years, SD = 1.44, 53.8% female) who completed a series of paper and pencil measures detailing their involvement in sport activities (sport group only), their self-efficacy beliefs in the physical domain, perceived sport competence and attractiveness, as well as global self-esteem. A structural model was tested for sport youth, specifying an effect of sport activities on self-efficacy that, in turn, was expected to predict subjective sport competence and attractiveness. Finally, the model postulated effects of competence and attractiveness on self-esteem. The model test revealed a good fit. Multi-group models considering type of leisure group and sex pointed to parallel patterns in the associations of self-efficacy, competence, attractiveness, and self-esteem in the subgroups.     

Multiple regression analyses in artificial-grammar learning: The importance of control groups

In artificial-grammar learning, it is crucial to ensure that above-chance performance in the test stage is due to learning in the training stage but not due to judgemental biases. Here we argue that multiple regression analysis can be successfully combined with the use of control groups to assess whether participants were able to transfer knowledge acquired during training when making judgements about test stimuli. We compared the regression weights of judgements in a transfer condition (training and test strings were constructed by the same grammar but with different letters) with those in a control condition. Predictors were identical in both conditions—judgements of control participants were treated as if they were based on knowledge gained in a standard training stage. The results of this experiment as well as reanalyses of a former study support the usefulness of our approach.     

Comment upon ‘"Poor girl": a case of active psychosis’: how therapeutic schemas may limit our work

The paper explores the effect of group participation on depressed women's ‘doing depression’ and ‘doing pleasure’ in Finland over three time periods. Quantitative data and qualitative data are analysed. To assess statistically the differences between the time periods, the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks z-test is applied to the quantitative data. Coping with emotions through self-focused attention, depressed women are reluctant to initiate instrumental behaviour. They tend to respond to their lives in a ruminative way. Moving towards pleasure rather than depression characterized women's activities as a result of the group process; they learned to embody health, while envisaging hope for the future. Our emphasis on embodiment allows us to consider agency as a contemporary group therapeutic effect as well as to contextualize psychotherapy research within post-modern thinking. While the findings do not provide an indisputable list of the ways women's activities changed over time or all the advantages of group participation, they do suggest areas for future exploration in connection with depressed women's healthy embodiment in a healing group context and advance an understanding of how the experience and duration of depression can be altered if the public and private boundaries of depressed women's embodied routines are broken down and self-isolation is challenged.     

Nature as therapist: Integrating permaculture with mindfulness- and acceptance-based therapy in the Danish Healing Forest Garden Nacadia

Nature-based therapy can be considered an umbrella term for a diverse range of psychotherapeutic and allied practices which integrate experiences and activities in nature as therapeutic means. The objective of this article is to describe the theoretical framework for nature-based therapy in a university-founded healing forest garden near Copenhagen, Denmark. The garden will offer a 10-week treatment for people who are on sick leave with stress-related illness. This article focuses on clarifying the integration between the psychotherapeutic and gardening aspects of the nature-based therapy. The psychotherapeutic aspects are based on mindfulness and an acceptance therapy, while the gardening aspects are highly inspired by permacultural principles and methods.     

Holistic Psychology: A Brief Primer

This article explicates the foundations, essential themes and healing principles of holistic psychology; an approach which provides a corrective for such trends in modern scientific psychology as disciplinary perspectives, the overemphasis on the economics and politics of professionalism. Holistic psychology emphasizes spiritual healing, multi-cultural counseling, community and ecological interventions. Its core pillars of practice and care stem from the spiritual and wisdom traditions widely applicable to combating illness, injustice, violence, materialism, and technocratic influences so prevalent in contemporary society. As a breath and/or spirit based healing practice, holistic psychology provides a foundational exercise for personal, social and cosmic transformation.     

Reference groups: A missing link in career studies

Careers unfold within and are bound by multiple social contexts. Newer career concepts have postulated a growing need for personal agency in overcoming structural constraints, especially organizational and occupational boundaries. As a consequence, research has focused more on the individual than on contextual factors. In order to answer recent criticism of this unbalanced view we argue that the impact of reference groups needs to be better understood, both as social drivers of agentic behavior and as social constraints that, for instance, reduce the permeability of boundaries. Drawing on identity theories and social network literature we suggest a classification of reference groups in which social domains (e.g., organization, occupation, family, friends), types of groups (known people, abstract social categories), and functions (normative, comparative, supportive) are distinguished. The reference group classification is employed to discuss extant career research and to propose three directions for future research: a) Fuller consideration of different social domains beyond the employing organization for a more complete understanding of social influences in contemporary careers; b) exploration of the possibly growing relevance of abstract social categories as referents, especially for subjective career success; and c) systematic analysis of the interaction between normative, comparative, and supportive functions of individuals' social networks. Across these themes, possible negative influences of reference groups and effects of imposed rather than chosen referents are also to be considered. Implications of the suggested research for better understanding the interaction between structure and agency in shaping careers and career identity are discussed.     

The effects of age-of-acquisition and frequency-of-occurrence in visual word recognition: Further evidence from the Dutch language

It has been claimed that the frequency effect in visual word naming is an artefact of age-of-acquisition: Words are named faster not because they are encountered more often in texts, but because they have been acquired earlier. In a series of experiments using immediate naming, lexical decision, and masked priming, we found that frequency had a clear effect in lexical tasks when age-of-acquisition is controlled for. At the same time, age-of-acquisition was a significant variable in all tasks, whereas imageability had no effect. These results corroborate findings previously reported in English and Dutch.     

A discursive analysis of psychosocial issues: Talk in a ‘parent group’ for families who have children with chronic renal failure

Abstract

This paper illustrates a discursive approach to ‘psychosocial issues’ in health care. The analysis examines examples of talk within support groups for parents of children with chronic renal failure. These ran over a 32 month period at a Regional Paediatric Renal Unit within the UK National Health Service. All the parents are directly involved in management of home based peritoneal dialysis of their children. The analysis examines features of the organisation and content of parents' talk about what is commonplace in the management of the demands they face in the difficult circumstances of their child care. Common understandings within the groups are shown to be achieved through the parents' exploration of uncertainties in the care of their children. The value of qualitative analysis of health care talk in the evaluation of support groups for families involved in this form of paediatric care is also discussed.