Seamus Prior

Overcoming stigma: how young people position themselves as counselling service users

Increasing attention has been focused on adolescent help-seeking in relation to services aimed at promoting mental health and wellbeing. Much research reinforces the ubiquity of concerns about negative stigmatisation by peers as a barrier to young people accessing services. This paper draws on interviews conducted with young people, who completed a course of counselling in school, to investigate how they managed and negotiated this. Drawing on positioning theory from discourse analysis, young peoples accounts are analysed with reference to the variety of positions they articulated and adopted. This demonstrates how they elaborated and reinforced virtuous problem-solver positions within broader discourses of individualisation and normalisation, and resisted positioning within a stigmatised mental illness discourse. Although focused on a small sample, the analysis offers potential insights into the ways other people may negotiate stigma concerns to access mental health resources, while also demonstrating the utility of positioning theory for understanding stigma and normalisation.

An evaluation of a school counselling service with direct links to Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) services

ABSTRACT An evaluation of a Scottish secondary school-based counselling service for students aged 11 to 18 is presented. Improvement in student emotional well-being was measured using the Young Persons Clinical Outcomes for Routine Evaluation (YP CORE) questionnaire and participant questionnaires which were developed for the study. Significant improvements were found, following counselling, for functioning, problems and well-being, with all three showing a large effect size. The counselling service was rated as helpful by the majority of the participating students, referrers and guidance staff. These findings are analysed with reference to the unique structure of this school counselling service with its governance framework integrated into the local Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) service.

Young People's Process of Engagement in School Counselling

Abstract Background: Adolescent reluctance to engage in help-seeking for psychological and emotional problems is well documented. Despite a significant expansion in counselling provision in UK secondary schools, young peoples experience of accessing counselling remains under-researched. Aim: The present study aimed to elucidate the key features and stages of the help-seeking process as defined by young people accessing school counselling. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people who had successfully completed a course of counselling at school. Thematic narrative analysis focusing on help-seeking was then applied to the interview transcripts. Results: The analysis proposes a multi-staged socially-mediated process of disclosure and engagement, from initial acknowledgement of a problem through to full disclosure to the counsellor. Discussion: Analysis of young peoples narratives highlights: the complex process of negotiation and evaluation which they undertake to engage fully in ...

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

In 1993, Julia Cream published an article deconstructing the politics surrounding the ‘cluster’ of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) diagnoses in Cleveland, UK. In 2014, in a viewpoint article in this journal, Dowler, Cuomo, and Laliberte called for a change in higher education governance, after the widely publicised Penn State CSA scandal. Within this 20-year period, these were two of only a handful of articles to be published in geography, focusing on CSA. Upwards of one in eight people in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand are survivors of CSA. Other social science disciplines have established the impact CSA can have on mental health, relationships and life choices, all of which are lived out in space and place. CSA survivors are also over-represented amongst geographically marginalised groups. We argue that human geographys silence on CSA represents a significant oversight not only in terms of understandings peoples relations to, use of and perceptions of space and place but also in terms of contributing to the silencing of survivors. We call for a recognition that this absent presence is associated with individual and social processes of dissociation and denial.

‘I have to hear them before I hear myself’: developing therapeutic conversations in British counselling students

Abstract Transcripts of interviews from six students who had just completed a one-year postgraduate certificate in counselling skills were subjected to a qualitative analysis that focused on their accounts of the therapeutic action of talking and listening. The course offered a dialogue between psychodynamic and person-centred theoretical orientations. Interpretative phenomenological analysis, the methodology employed to make sense of their experience offers a dialogue between interpretative and phenomenological philosophical stances, thus mirroring the task faced by the students. Three themes with associated subthemes were surfaced: (1) Therapeutic openness captured the students’ understandings of how the phenomenological principle of openness is experienced in practice; (2) Hearing beyond discourse reflected how their listening deepened during the course; (3) Presence reflected the changing quality of the encounter between the self and the other. These findings reflect British counselling students’ lived experiences of listening and talking in their developing practice. We connect these results to broader themes of theory and research into the role of language in therapeutic conversations.

‘Pink at the heart of it’: The containment of vulnerability by a man and a boy in therapy for sexual abuse

Through detailed exploration of countertransference experience and its use in practice, this article uses a single case study to illustrate the centrality of the acknowledgement and containment of vulnerability in the recovery process for abused children. Working chronologically through the course of therapy, I analyse the childs employment of chaotic behaviour as a defensive strategy, the tie to the bad object, working with ambivalence to therapy, responses to the manifestation of controlling and dominant behaviour and the metabolising function of the therapeutic relationship. Highlighting the significance of supervision in creating an essential space for thinking, my examination of working through the countertransference includes both the capacity and the failure to tolerate the re-evocation of feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness in the therapist, and the unexpected re-emergence of the therapists personal experience of childhood victimisation. This case study concludes with an exploration of how the integration of vulnerability may present particular challenges for abused boys and advocates for the distinct potential of the male therapist in their recovery process.