Social Support

Tolerance and Social Inclusion: Calling All Individuals

November 16th is “International Day for Tolerance”, for which U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared: “I call on all people and governments to actively combat fear, hatred and extremism with dialogue, understanding and mutual respect. Let us advance against the forces of division and unite for our shared future.” November 21-29 is “Social Inclusion Week”, which […]

The Ten Commandments of Grief Counselling

Suicide is a significant public health problem, and properly supporting those left behind — the survivors — is a challenging but significant contribution to the wellbeing of the whole community. If a suicide-bereaved person wound up in your therapy room, what counselling tasks would need to be worked through with them? In this post we […]

Core Actions of Psychological First Aid

In the first video of this two-part series (Principles of Psychological First Aid), Richard Hill looked at the five principles that are the basis for all Psychological First Aid: that is, promoting safety, calmness, self-efficacy, connectedness, and hope. In this talk, Richard will be putting you into the field: that is, the explorations will take […]

Principles of Psychological First Aid

Psychological First Aid is a means of providing psychosocial support to individuals and families immediately after a disaster, terrorist or traumatic event, or other emergency. It consists of a set of helping actions which are systematically undertaken in order to reduce initial post-trauma distress and to support short- and long-term adaptive functioning. Based on the […]

Social Support Development Skills

The saying that “no man is an island” seems not truer anywhere than in the realm of resilience. Happiness author and business coach Alvah Parker lists ten traits of resilient, happy people. In the very first one she notes that resilient people “are strong people who realize the importance of having a good social support […]

Child Abuse and Neglect: Intervention

There is not a clear cut off line from where the assessment ends and the intervention begins in child and family work. Following is a number of approaches to intervention that have been selected because they are consistent with values of self-determination, respect, dignity empowerment and social justice: values commonly drawn upon in child and […]

Parenting a Problem Adolescent: Resilience

Tunmore (cited in Regel & Roberts, 2002, 73) outlined various mental health promoting factors (based on evidence) that are relevant to adolescent kids and to parents alike to reflect upon. They include: Individual Self-esteem, sociability and autonomy Social support systems that encourage personal effort and coping Good communication skills A sense of humour Religious faith […]