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This paper describes the involvement of peer trainers in Tree of Life groups for young people living with Type 1 Diabetes. The approach is informed by narrative therapy and collective narrative practice and principles, where people are seen as separate from problems and the focus is on creating opportunities for people to tell and witness one another’s preferred identity stories. Young people who have participated in a Tree of Life day are invited to join the project as peer trainers who help facilitate, engage group participants, witness their stories and consult to the project. Involving peer trainers also aims to create a community where preferred identity stories can be lived and witnessed. This paper describes the training for peer trainers and the building of community.

The Oxford English dictionary's first definition of 'appreciate' is 'recognise the full worth of', and synonyms include 'value, respect, prize, cherish, treasure, admire'. Appreciation, that includes valuing, respecting and cherishing what people bring to their work, is integral to the collaborative approach to consultation authors describe in this chapter, which is informed by collaborative systemic therapy approaches like Anderson. In the late 1980s, David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva developed Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a strengths-based approach to positive change that has been used successfully in communities and organisations all around the world. Exploring the values and commitments that connect with what consultees appreciate about their work can give us, as consultants, a deeper appreciation of what sustains the consultees when their work is difficult. Through affirming and appreciating practices, the process of AI generates new possibilities for cooperation and creates opportunities for sharing commitments and dreams.

This chapter describes an approach to collaborative consultation where consultant and consultee join their expertise to explore dilemmas and challenges towards developing new possibilities. Requests for consultation often come out of beliefs like Annie's, that consultants have the solutions that will make the difference. This may come from an assumption that consultants have expert knowledge or skills that they bring from their specialised training and work experience with specific client groups. Intending to take a collaborative position and work with rather than consult to the group enabled to suspend some views and connect with curiosity to find out what Annie and the group had to offer. Consultees have often told that taking time to work out what they want from the consultation and what they want to be different has contributed considerably towards their finding ways to go on. The problems practitioners bring for consultation affect not only their clients or patients but many other people connected or involved.

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.

We are writing this chapter in the contexts of our work as systemic psychotherapists, supervisors and supervisees, drawing on our practice as clinical psychologists in sexual health and child and adolescent medicine services within our public health service. This work often involves conversations with clients, supervisees and supervisors about intimate bodily experiences, including sexual feelings and behaviour that can challenge our usual professional psychotherapy discourses. In supervision with us, supervisees from a range of services have presented both arousal and disgust as unwanted bodily sensations in relation to clients and have described dif?culty ‘admitting’ these feelings to themselves or supervisors. This chapter focuses on supervision practices we have developed to address strong bodily sensations and experiences of arousal and disgust in supervision conversations.

‘If it doesn’t start personal, it does not start. But if it ends personal then it ends.’(Pancho Arguelles, 2007)

This article explores how we might bring forth and value the voice of the person with intellectual disabilities alongside the voice of their family and carers so that all those present can feel understood and appreciated. We offer a description of systemic empathy as the ability to connect with one person while maintaining the possibility of connecting with other individuals in the system and at the same time tuning in to those people's connections with each other. We share examples from practice that challenge our ability to work empathically when there are several people in the same room holding different or opposing perspectives and who evoke different emotional reactions in us. We offer principles and practices through which we have been able to make empathy systemic with examples from our work with adults with intellectual disabilities and their families. These include empathizing through curiosity and irreverence, co-creating meanings with more than one person, double listening with ears, eyes and bodies, preparing our own emotional postures, taking the perspectives of others and creating reflecting processes.

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.

Family therapists from 10 different countries (China, India, Israel including Palestinian citizens, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom) describe systemic therapy in their contexts and current innovative work and challenges. They highlight the importance of family therapy continuing to cut across disciplines, the power of systems ideas in widely diverse settings and institutions (such as courts, HIV projects, working with people forced into exile), extensive new mental health initiatives (such as in Turkey and India), as well as the range of family therapy journals available (four alone in Spain). Many family therapy groups are collaborating across organizations (especially in Asia) and the article presents other ideas for connections such as a clearing house to inexpensively translate family therapy articles into other languages.

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 influences of social and family characteristics on individual differences in reading and spelling ability and IQ were investigated for 550 twin children aged 13 yrs. Measures of family social circumstances, parental background, the emotional atmosphere at home and the family's reading behaviour were used as predictor variables in multiple regression analyses with reading, spelling and IQ as dependent variables. There were consistent relationships between many of these measures and the dependent variables. The findings are compared to a previous biometrical genetic analysis of the same data set. It is concluded that the results are within the limits predicted by the genetic analysis. Most of the effect of these environmental influences on children are general, i.e. related to IQ, and not specifically related to reading. After controlling for the effects of IQ on reading, only family size and some aspects of parent-child relationships were significant predictors of reading ability

This article weaves research findings and clinical practice to address five ethical dilemmas: How to include children in sessions so that they feel listened to, appreciated and not judged; how to attend to children's feelings without making the focus solely their troubles; how to create a context in which children can express themselves when they cannot find the words; how to ensure a suitable time, place and relationship for talking; and how to create a safe context for respectful co-ordination between the different views of children and adults. A practical example including transcripts from sessions is presented. The authors show how a toy bear joining two therapists in a reflecting team can create opportunities for a 10-year-old girl and her parents to voice their different views and hear the different perspectives of each other. The parents, who generously agreed to share details of their family sessions, offered useful feedback on this write-up, suggesting that this article may be useful for staff and parents who join therapists in a playful approach to reflecting teams with children.

This study investigates whether 13-year-old retarded (SRR) and backward (RB) readers show differences in their use of two reading strategies: phonological and whole word. Thirty-eight SRR and 63 RB children were compared on their ability to read non-words (phonological strategy), irregular words (whole word strategy) and the relative facility with which they read regular compared to irregular words (regularity effect). In order to control for IQ and reading level two different two-group designs were employed: a ‘mental-age control’ design where only IQ was controlled and a ‘reading-age match’ design in which reading level and IQ were both taken into account. The findings suggest that in terms of single word reading, retarded and backward readers are not distinct groups, at least at 13 years of age. The overall level of reading proficiency explains most of the difference in reading between the two groups and they do not necessarily use different reading strategies. The implications of these findings for the controversy over subtypes of reading disability and the continuum of reading skill are discussed.

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.