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Over the last decade, inspired by systemic family therapy and narrative approaches, Glenda and her teams in the UK have found ways to bring families, practitioners and communities together to respond to medical, mental health and social care crises. This work has taken place with children, adolescents, older people and people affected by intellectual disability and their families. This paper shares an inspiring story of this work and describes ways of 'conducting' and 'weaving' networks of hope.

This article describes the ‘Beads of Life’ approach – a five-part methodology informed by narrative therapy to enable children and young people to make sense of their cancer journey in ways that make them stronger. Young people are invited to use beads as prompts to tell preferred stories of their identity to create a safe place to stand from which to story their cancer journey. The approach positions young people as experts in their lives. It aims to change their relationship with cancer to reduce its negative impact on life by lessening isolation. By enabling medical staff to get to know the young person apart from the cancer, this approach aims to create hope for the future and improve quality of care.

This study explored whether certain child characteristics (age, type of problem presented, and gender) influenced the referral decisions of parents, general practitioners, and child psychologists. These three groups were taken as key gatekeepers in controlling access to mental health services. Results suggested that age of child and type of problem significantly affected the subject's responses whilst sex of child did not. Psychologically disturbed 10-year olds may be more likely to reach mental health services than psychologically disturbed 3-year olds, and children who showed their disturbance in terms of conduct disorder may be more likely to arouse concern than those who present with emotional disturbance.

Clients and professionals bring to their relationship with each other beliefs about the helping process which can significantly influence the outcome of referral and treatment. This article describes the development of the authors' ideas about this relationship to help and some of the beliefs that contribute to it. In clinical practice, issues around the relationship to help may need to be addressed at the referral, engagement or therapy phases.

This paper describes a model of crisis intervention to families of adolescents below the age of 16 who deliberately harm themselves and summarizes the premises which guide our practice. The adolescent's "overdose" is understood as an attempt to resolve relationship conflicts and so the initial interview aims to explore the predicament for the adolescent and the family and decide what further help may be required. Verbatim extracts from one session illustrate this process. Language: en

The reading skills of 285 pairs of 13-year-old twins drawn from the general population were studied. The twins were independently tested using standardized measures of intelligence, reading and spelling ability. The genetic contribution to reading ability was assessed by examination of correlations in monozygotk: (MZ) and student-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins, and by analysing differences bi Mccen MZ and DZ twins in concordance of reading disability rates. The results suggested that, at this age, genetic factors play only a moderate role in general reading backwardness or specific reading retardation. However, when spelling ability was investigated, a heritability of 0.53 was obtained, increasing to 0.75 when intelligence was controlled. Strong genetic influences on spelling were also found when concordance rates for spelling disability were compared for MZ and DZ pairs.