A call to action for therapists to politicize their practice through an emotional decolonial lens. An essential work that centers colonial and historical trauma in a framework for healing, Decolonizing Therapy illuminates that all therapy is—and always has been— inherently political. To better understand the mental health oppression and institutional violence that exists today, we must become familiar with the root of disembodiment from our histories, homelands, and healing practices. Only then will readers see how colonial, historical, and intergenerational legacies have always played a role in the treatment of mental health. This book is the emotional companion and guide to decolonization. It is an invitation for Eurocentrically trained clinicians to acknowledge privileged and oppressed parts while relearning what we thought we knew. Ignoring collective global trauma makes delivering effective therapy impossible; not knowing how to interrogate privilege (as a therapist, client, or both) makes healing elusive; and shying away from understanding how we as professionals may be participating in oppression is irresponsible.

Reconnect to your Higher Self to find your truth, unlearn limiting beliefs and biases, know your worth and experience your wholeness. Insecurities, inadequacies, self-doubt; we all have them, and never more so than in this age of social media saturation. Sometimes we can feel alone and limited by the lens on the world we grew up with. Hello, Higher Self is a self-care manifesto that calls on you to radically shift your perspective from the Learned Hierarchical Beliefs (LHBs) – judging yourself against the world around you – we’ve all internalized, to the self-acceptance we were born into – aka our Higher Self. Connecting with your Higher Self means finding your own source of truth, wisdom and power, and remembering your innate worth in a world that can make you feel like an outsider who has to prove that you belong. You will learn to harness the power of your Higher Self through: · Becoming witness to your thoughts · Investigating where your thoughts come from · Replacing negative thoughts with the voice of your Higher Self · Changing your behaviour to support your relationship to your Higher Self This book shines a light on 18 areas of life where LHBs often lurk – creativity, work, relationships, race, body image, queerness, mental health, spirituality and more. Bunny’s mix of meditative advice, written exercises and personal examples make for a transformative read. Hello, Higher Self provides revolutionary and practical tools for staying connected to your Higher Self and affirming, no matter what, that you are enough.

Fostering a dialog between Critical Disability Studies, American Studies, InterAmerican Studies, and Global Health Studies, the edited compilation conceptualizes disability and (mental) illnesses as a cultural narrative enabling a deeper social critique. By looking at contemporary cultural productions primarily from the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean, the books’ objective is to explore how literary texts and other cultural productions from the Americas conceptualize, construct, and represent disability as a narrative and to investigate the deep structures underlying the literary and cultural discourses on and representations of disability including parameters such as disease, racism, and sexism among others. Disability is read as a shifting phenomenon rooted in the cultures and histories of the Americas.

This book is your essential introduction to relational counselling and psychotherapy. It maps out relational concepts and approaches by drawing on humanistic, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and systemic modalities, using case material to demonstrate different ways of being a relational practitioner. The book shows you how to use relationally orientated skills, competencies, interventions and practices across the therapy process from beginning – middle – end. Content on the social context, on issues of power, diversity and difference, support your personal and professional development. Supported by case studies, recent research and a wealth of learning features, this book will support your development as a relational therapist

Exercises and activities to help you move past what’s holding you back, in work and life You want to get fit, but you keep putting it off. Your career is stalled out, and you’re not sure how to give it a jump. You fall into the same unhealthy relationship patterns over and over. If you’ve been in any of these scenarios, you know what it means to be stuck—but you don’t have to stay that way. You’re not lazy and you’re not unmotivated. You just need the right set of tools. And Britt Frank uses her background as a clinician, educator, and trauma specialist to bring you a whole new tool kit with this interactive workbook. Inside you’ll find questionnaires, writing prompts, and other practical, step-by-step exercises to help you: break bad habits communicate more skillfully stop the war in your head hold healthy boundaries restore your sense of choice Take control of your actions and the life you want to live with The Getting Unstuck Workbook.

There has been much recent commentary regarding a ‘crisis’ in academic mental health and wellbeing. This Research Handbook showcases cutting-edge studies and insightful narratives on the wellbeing of doctoral students, early career researchers, and faculty members, illuminating the current state of academic mental health research. Importantly, authors also offer potential solutions to the increasingly poor mental health reported by those working and studying in the higher education sector.

“Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.” At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff’s essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world’s most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression. The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm. Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference. Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and practice that are inclusive of those who have been systematically subjugated and promote anti-sanist approaches to counter inequalities, prejudices, and discrimination. Confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many, the Mad Studies Reader asks the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed. This collection will be of interest to mental health clinicians; students and scholars of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and anyone who has been affected by mental difference, directly or indirectly, who is curious to explore new perspectives.