In this issue
‘Where lunatics prosper’ (free article)
Jeanine Connor reveals some hard facts about mental health labels and latency-age boys playing console games
‘Monstrous’ teens
Beasts, supervillains and freeing the Wounded Self, by David Taransaud
Anger management: the myth
We need to hear why young people are angry, says Nick Luxmoore
Anger: a way through
Mike Trier on groupwork with Year 9 boys
Building blocks for boys
Guidelines from Andrew Malekoff for effective groupwork with boys
Coaching and ADHD
A child with ADHD symptoms may still benefit from coaching, says Naomi Richards
Destination PhD
Val Taylor continues her series
Assessing creatively
Liana Lowenstein offers guidelines and techniques in advance of her visit to the UK
Indigenous and invisible
What do counsellors need to understand? Narelle Smith reports from Australia
Getting CBT into schools
Colleen Cummings and colleagues ponder the issue
From the chair
Not all articles from this issue are available online. Divisional members and subscribers can download the pdf from the BACP Children, Young People and Families archive.
Welcome from the editor
Anger is bad. An anger-sized epidemic is torching society. We must douse it before it destroys us. No one in history has ever been so angry as Generation Z. We must anger-manage, anger-manage, anger-man…
And so it goes on, sparking from teacher to town counsellor, from Member of Parliament to media spokesman – even igniting flames among therapists and social workers. Truly, I have begun to believe that publishers finance their Sunday brunch on the back of ‘anger’ book sales. Else, why the burgeoning industry?
My groupwork kids have anger aplenty. But do I eradicate it? No. Because they’ve got lots to be angry about. And because they manage their anger perfectly well when it suits them – management isn’t the real issue. As Nick Luxmoore says in his article: ‘Anger itself isn’t the problem. The problem is when no one’s prepared to listen to it.’
Anger is healthy (if expressed in an acceptable way). Anger needs hearing (if we can tolerate the disclosures). And anger needs using to good effect (if we’re brave enough to help our clients see how). So, instead, I use a two-layered anger wheel I threw together one evening (you can see it at http://bit.ly/mT1zUT) so that we can discuss what lies beneath their anger. It was this wheel that started my discussions with Nick Luxmoore about writing us a piece around anger. As well as Nick’s myth-debunking article, we have a report from Mike Trier about groupwork with angry young people, and one from David Taransaud, who seeks a way through young people’s angry, ‘feral’ behaviour to their tied-up Wounded Self – by playing the part of a hostage negotiator. I commend these articles to you. But angry violence, and other behaviours variously labelled as ‘conduct disorder’, ‘ADHD’ or ‘ASD’, are not always so: Jeanine Connor makes a link to the abuse and chaos that our clients witness in their homes or express on their games consoles. She charges us not to classify these symptoms as anything other than what they are, but to deal with the underlying societal blindness that allows them to grow. If you leave everything else to read later, please turn the page and read this.
And now to something more welcome. There have rarely been up-to-date counselling books available in electronic format, so I’m delighted to find that three of our review books and several other recent and relevant publications are available as downloads. If you’re someone who prefers reading on an e-device, it’s worth going online to check whether your chosen book is available in electronic format. It will be cheaper. This is because, despite attracting a VAT component, printed versions of counselling books are short-run and therefore relatively expensive. If the prospect of buying textbooks has ever made you choke on your Sunday brunch, perhaps the industry has heard our anger and responded appropriately. It’s a thought.
Eleanor Patrick
Editor