Increasing attention has been focused on adolescent help‐seeking in relation to services aimed at promoting mental health and wellbeing. Much research reinforces the ubiquity of concerns about ...negative stigmatisation by peers as a barrier to young people accessing services. This paper draws on interviews conducted with young people, who completed a course of counselling in school, to investigate how they managed and negotiated this. Drawing on positioning theory from discourse analysis, young people’s accounts are analysed with reference to the variety of positions they articulated and adopted. This demonstrates how they elaborated and reinforced virtuous problem‐solver positions within broader discourses of individualisation and normalisation, and resisted positioning within a stigmatised mental illness discourse. Although focused on a small sample, the analysis offers potential insights into the ways other people may negotiate stigma concerns to access mental health resources, while also demonstrating the utility of positioning theory for understanding stigma and normalisation.
Written by an experienced psychodynamic therapist, this paper likens one’s narrative of becoming a therapist to an ancient palimpsest manuscript, where layer is built upon layer, yet traces of ...earlier texts keep coming through. Dipping into his personal archive of writings on this theme, the author revisits earlier constructions of his narrative, appraising them from his current perspective. Moving between past and present, personal experience and theory, clinical practice and research, this paper builds a rich, densely woven narrative account of becoming a therapist, while interrogating the process through which such a narrative is constructed and the purposes it serves. It concludes with reflections on the insights gained through the process of this inquiry, acknowledging the significant ontological and epistemological shifts that have occurred in the author’s approach to both asking and answering the question ‘What brings me here?’
This paper draws upon qualitative research with three Kuwaiti counselling clients to explore how they negotiated accessing counselling in the context of their communities, culture and faith. Contrary ...to the prevailing view in the literature portraying Islamic faith as a barrier to help-seeking in mental health, these clients view their faith as an important facilitator for accessing formal help. In particular, participants distinguished faith from culture and appealed to sacred scriptures to demonstrate the convergence of Muslim values with help-seeking in relation to psychological distress. This paper offers an original and timely discussion of one aspect of the potential interface of Islamic faith and counselling, while acknowledging the limitations of the small self-selected sample from which the findings are drawn.
Befriending is a service in which volunteers provide companionship and support usually to people who are lonely or isolated. Such services are promoted in Scotland’s national strategy to improve the ...lives of people with dementia, around a third of whom live alone. However, little is known about the perspectives of recipients. Taking a holistic qualitative case study approach, the aim of this research was to explore how people living alone with dementia experienced befriending and the contexts in which their befriending relationships were meaningful. Three people were visited on five separate occasions. Largely unstructured conversations allowed individuals to prioritise areas of importance to them within the broad topics of befriending, everyday life, social networks and biography. Participants also had the option of ‘showing’ how they spent their time with their befriender. Data were analysed using the voice-centred relational method. Three key messages emerged: befriending satisfied unmet needs and wishes for particular kinds of relationship; befriending was a facilitated friendship; and befriending was a human response to contingent and existential limitations.
Background: Adolescent reluctance to engage in help‐seeking for psychological and emotional problems is well documented. Despite a significant expansion in counselling provision in UK secondary ...schools, young people's experience of accessing counselling remains under‐researched. Aim: The present study aimed to elucidate the key features and stages of the help‐seeking process as defined by young people accessing school counselling. Method: Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with young people who had successfully completed a course of counselling at school. Thematic narrative analysis focusing on help‐seeking was then applied to the interview transcripts. Results: The analysis proposes a multi‐staged socially‐mediated process of disclosure and engagement, from initial acknowledgement of a problem through to full disclosure to the counsellor. Discussion: Analysis of young people's narratives highlights: the complex process of negotiation and evaluation which they undertake to engage fully in school counselling; the careful management of stigmatisation concerns both through practical access arrangements and the language in which school counselling is framed; the significant balanced position of the counsellor as both integrated and separate within the school community; and the key role of facilitators in enabling young people to access counselling, both practically and psychologically.
The experiences of survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) have received almost no attention in geography. However, activists and therapists working with survivors have long recognised that CSA has ...spatial impacts and that finding some sense of control over one's environment is an important step in recovering from this trauma. By bringing the stories of three adult women who are survivors of CSA into conversation with debates in human geography about the habitation of space and place, this psychosocial paper goes some small way towards addressing this oversight. Set in the context of the high prevalence of CSA in all communities, we argue that efforts to understand everyday, domestic and marginalised geographies need to consider the potential impact of abuse. By understanding psychosocial pathways by which abuse impacts on individuals we highlight how violence and trauma can impact on personal geographies in a myriad of ways.
In 1993, Julia Cream published an article deconstructing the politics surrounding the 'cluster' of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) diagnoses in Cleveland, UK. In 2014, in a viewpoint article in this ...journal, Dowler, Cuomo, and Laliberte called for a change in higher education governance, after the widely publicised Penn State CSA scandal. Within this 20-year period, these were two of only a handful of articles to be published in geography, focusing on CSA. Upwards of one in eight people in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand are survivors of CSA. Other social science disciplines have established the impact CSA can have on mental health, relationships and life choices, all of which are lived out in space and place. CSA survivors are also over-represented amongst geographically marginalised groups. We argue that human geography's silence on CSA represents a significant oversight not only in terms of understandings people's relations to, use of and perceptions of space and place but also in terms of contributing to the silencing of survivors. We call for a recognition that this absent presence is associated with individual and social processes of dissociation and denial.
This qualitative study considers Thai counsellors’ experience of practising Buddhist Counselling in Thailand, exploring how Buddhist philosophy is integrated into the counsellors’ personal lives and ...then brought into their therapeutic practice. The study involved a focus group and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with five practising Buddhist counsellors, with their accounts being analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings indicated that the participants considered their personal qualities as being key in generating therapeutic effectiveness within their Buddhist Counselling, and they believed that they fostered these personal qualities by internalising Buddhist ideas into their personal lives and by observing Buddhist practices. Implications for counselling practice, training, and research are discussed.
Transcripts of interviews from six students who had just completed a one-year postgraduate certificate in counselling skills were subjected to a qualitative analysis that focused on their accounts of ...the therapeutic action of talking and listening. The course offered a dialogue between psychodynamic and person-centred theoretical orientations. Interpretative phenomenological analysis, the methodology employed to make sense of their experience offers a dialogue between interpretative and phenomenological philosophical stances, thus mirroring the task faced by the students. Three themes with associated subthemes were surfaced: (1) Therapeutic openness captured the students' understandings of how the phenomenological principle of openness is experienced in practice; (2) Hearing beyond discourse reflected how their listening deepened during the course; (3) Presence reflected the changing quality of the encounter between the self and the other. These findings reflect British counselling students' lived experiences of listening and talking in their developing practice. We connect these results to broader themes of theory and research into the role of language in therapeutic conversations.
Developing therapeutic listening Lee, Billy; Prior, Seamus
British journal of guidance & counselling,
04/2013, Volume:
41, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We present an experience-near account of the development of therapeutic listening in first year counselling students. A phenomenological approach was employed to articulate the trainees' lived ...experiences of their learning. Six students who had just completed a one-year postgraduate certificate in counselling skills were interviewed and the transcripts analysed using the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Developing therapeutic reflexivity emerged as a strong recurrent theme. Four subthemes captured the characteristics of this reflexivity: (1) Learning to hear the self; (2) Listening as relationship; (3) Revelation of otherness; and (4) Thereness. These findings foreground the development of therapeutic openness, bracketing and reflexivity in learning to listen therapeutically, and help to make sense of the complex transition experienced by students during their first year of counselling education.
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