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By conceptualizing abused women as victims or survivors, the literature offers two contradictory narratives of abused women. The aim of this article is to show that these two narratives are not mutually exclusive but rather can be used simultaneously to represent battered women’s existential experiences. The study sample was comprised of 20 Israeli battered women. Three in-depth interviews were conducted with each participant—twice for data collection purposes and once for validating the themes that emerged from the content analysis. “Strength trapped in weakness/weakness trapped in strength” was found to be a dominant theme in the life narratives of the interviewees. Most interviewees grew up in families of origin in distress; most were abused physically and emotionally. Although this anguish colored their lives with pain and turmoil, their experiences were the key to their ability to overcome difficulties. From the onset, interviewees’ lives were marked by a sense of threat and deprivation, but these very difficulties were also the source of a sense of power that emerged from the women’s struggle with their past. In their attempts to cope with and transcend the legacies of their past, interviewees’ feelings oscillated continuously between past and present, creating a unique powerful sense of simultaneously being victims and survivors. Implications for intervention are suggested.

Social work students experience emotional stress while having to perform and meet expectations from both academy and field. They may often feel physically and emotionally overwhelmed while struggling to make the time and space to fully process the varied experiences involved. There seems to be an unmet need for an ‘accompanying place’ where thoughts, feelings and dilemmas can be observed in a non‐evaluative way. Mindfulness has evolved lately as an efficient therapeutic technique in therapy. This paper describes a technique that applies mindfulness meditation in a group format in order to create a broader and richer learning experience that answers students' emotional needs. The group met for eight weeks. Its goals were to enhance self‐awareness and increase emotional support in handling field and academic stressors while experiencing different states of consciousness. Findings show that students were able to acquire new knowledge about themselves, experience autonomy in learning self‐containment and regu...

The literature on spirituality and social work reveals a shift from an initial stage of defining concepts like spirituality and religion and their relevance to social work and to current implementation of spiritually oriented techniques in therapy. This reflects epistemological and ontological shifts as social work has opened up to holistic and transpersonal theories assuming the existence of a metaphysical reality. Within these paradigmatic shifts, mindfulness has emerged as a central practice to expand consciousness for the purpose of self‐observation and knowing the world. Recent research demonstrates that mindfulness can gradually achieve outcomes like acceptance, letting go, trust, non‐judgmental attitude, and self‐awareness. In addition to its facilitation of individual change in clients' internal and external worlds, mindfulness has the potential to effect change in therapists, in the profession of social work, and in the world at large.

This article presents a four-level developmental description of the extent to which clinicians apply spirituality in therapy. At the first level, clinicians begin to sense dissonance regarding their traditional, positivist worldview while conducting conventional psychotherapy, especially in cases involving life-threatening situations or loss. At the second level, clinicians open up to the possibility of the existence of a metaphysical reality and to spiritual/transpersonal beliefs expressed by clients. At the third level, clinicians may cautiously contact this transcendental reality and seek ways to utilize this dimension to access information relevant to therapy. At the fourth level, clinicians actively engage in implementing transpersonal interventions aimed at facilitating change and healing. These levels of integration are delineated along with inherent changes in therapist worldview, perceived professional role, and relevant dilemmas.

Health-risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of morbidity and mortality among adolescents and young adults are often established during adolescence and extended into adulthood. Unintentional motor vehicle injury is the leading cause of mortality in childhood and adolescence in developed countries. This review presents some of the risk factors found in research on unintentional injury and death in adolescence, including risk factors for siblings and adolescents with intellectual disability. These findings should be connected with the findings of a recent study that showed that about one third of all unintentional childhood injury deaths in the United States were preventable. For injury prevention to take place and being effective a multidisciplinary approach is needed to identify host, agent and environmental factors using epidemiology research and biomechanics. In the population of adolescents with intellectual disability there has been little research on injury epidemiology or injury prevention and the service provider will need to focus and educate staff on this issue in order to prevent injury that can result in further disability.

Obesity in adolescence has increased significantly over the past 30-40 years and a recent international comparison study (13 European countries, Israel and the US) showed that the highest prevalence in adolescents was found in the US (12.6% in 13 year old boys, 10.8% in girls; 13.9% in 15 year old boys and 15.1% in 15 year old girls) and the lowest in Lithuania. This increase in adolescence is a public health concern, because most obese adolescents continue their obesity into adulthood with serious risk for chronic disease. Focus should therefore be on prevention programs that increase healthier patterns of lifestyle and physical activity.

There has been observed a worldwide increase in childhood asthma and this short communication reviews current research on adolescent asthma in Israel. Several studies have found an overall asthma prevalence of 7.8% for Jewish children, 4.9% for Arab children and 3.7% for the total population, while 7.8% was found in Bedouin children in the south of Israel. For the 1980-1997 period for the 5-34 year age group the AMR (asthma mortality rate) per 100,000 was found to be 0.226 with no significant difference between Jews and Arabs. This is a decrease as a result of increase in the use of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and a better anti-inflammatory treatment.