Blog

All children need help to find their voice. For some young people, the act of speaking up or speaking out is associated with experiences of being ignored, discredited or silenced. To mark the beginning of Children’s Mental Health Week 2024, adolescent psychotherapist and author Jeanine Connor reflects on the therapeutic process of enabling a young person to believe that their voice matters – and to feel heard outside the therapy room, too.

Janina Fisher, world-renowned trauma and attachment specialist, on the gendered stigma of BPD diagnoses – and how a trauma-informed reframing can liberate our female clients. Part 1 in our new PESI UK Blog series, Free Clinical Conversations: An Hour With an Expert.

How can we continue to hold risk when so many clients are in crisis, and when under-resourced support and emergency services appear on the brink of collapse? Jude Boyles, manager of a Refugee Council therapy service, shares the mounting – and perhaps familiar – pressures being experienced by her team, and explores what we can do to contain clients and colleagues in a world where ambulances may never arrive.

When clients have the impulse to self-harm, what helps them stop? Not safety contracts, argues Lisa Ferentz, but help finding alternative ways to cope, self-soothe and communicate. To mark Self-Injury Awareness Day, the specialist in trauma and self-destructive behaviours shares her empowering alternative intervention, ‘CARESS’.

How can thinking in terms of our clients’ and our own internal parts help us work with suicidality? What ‘positive intentions’ could be at play within a client who is considering suicide? Internal Family Systems workshop facilitator and psychotherapist, Sue Smith, outlines the IFS approach, including the importance of asking each part of a suicidal client for its own story

According to a new survey commissioned by Self-Harm UK, The Mix and YoungMinds, a third of 16-25 year-olds in Britain have at some point self-harmed. Despite these rising numbers, confusions and contradictions persist in the way we define and conceptualise self-harm. To mark Self-Harm Awareness Day on March 1, Professor Stephen Briggs addresses the link between suicide and self-harm, and explains why they need to be understood in the context of core developmental struggles.