Janet Etzi

Analysis of play

Abstract Play has long been considered a useful therapeutic tool when working with children. Even though play is used extensively by psychotherapists of various theoretical persuasions, relatively little is written concerning the nature and therapeutic value of play. In addition, the therapeutic significance of play in psychotherapy with adults is an area that has been neglected and under‐utilized. This paper will address the nature of play and what it is that makes play therapeutic within a conceptual framework derived from psychoanalytic theory, existentialism and phenomenology. In particular, the nature of play and its therapeutic value will be analyzed through three constitutive elements: the paradoxical nature of play, the role of the imagination and the symbolic, and the playful therapist.

Cause for concern and optimism: The global state of women’s mental health.

It is stated in the introduction to Women’s Mental Health: Resistance and Resilience in Community and Society that the World Health Organization (2000), after reviewing worldwide evidence on women’s mental health, sees the need to shift the focus of the mental health profession from the individual to the environmental context in which women find themselves as these contexts have the greatest impact on women’s health overall. The second critical point made at the outset pinpoints the multidisciplinary perspective taken by the editors. This complex perspective includes various research methodologies that add richness to the vast amount of data gathered in this volume for the reader. Women’s individual voices and subjective experiences are adhered to while interweaving them within their relationships, communities, and societal contexts. So while the text serves as a useful reference source for current data on the global state of women’s mental health, it contains added value as a result of the attention paid to lived experiences of women. But perhaps most important is the theme of the interaction of resistance and resilience that women themselves enact to protect their families and themselves, as well as to adapt to the profound changes and struggles they encounter in their daily lives. The focus on resistance and resilience highlights women’s strengths and capacities even within the most traumatic and stressful of circumstances. Recognizing women’s sources of resilience and resistance provides mental health professionals, policy makers, and administrators of public health and mental health services with useful tools for their work with and on behalf of these women. What could have been a daunting read given the large amount of data showing the extraordinary stresses and strains women are encountering turns out to be a resource for both useful information about how to help women and for encouragement or inspiration to implement solutions and strategies that take women’s resilience into account.