Director’s Notes

It has long been recognised that psychiatric diagnoses are powerfully influenced by social and temporal factors with some favoured in some times and countries over others. Sharpe et.al (1974) explored the discrepancies in national statistics for admissions to psychiatric hospitals between the United States which favoured the diagnosis of schizophrenia as compared… Read more

When parents present a child for therapy the implicit and sometimes explicit request is to focus on ‘the person with the problem’ to the exclusion of all other relationships. Systemic thinkers understand this is unhelpful, for in the web of family relationships everything and everyone is connected, and resolution of… Read more

Much has been written over the past year of the detrimental impact on individual, couple and family mental health and functioning as a result of the pandemic and in particular rates of violence towards women and children which have escalated as families with an abusive member have been locked down… Read more

When the pandemic hit early in 2020 plans initially ground to a halt and it soon became clear to the executive of the Australian Association of Family Therapy (AAFT) that our advertised conference in Perth would not proceed. All local professional development events were cancelled as were the regular meetings of… Read more

Problems, symptoms, and dynamics appear in batches and recently I have encountered a challenging dynamic working with young people. The issue relates to the question of diagnosis and not infrequently a demand for medication to ‘solve the problem’. Attempting to make sense of this I have noticed that all but… Read more

Children’s books are comforting. Even those that address highly painful and difficult issues like John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which tells the story of two boys, a Jew and the child of a German officer who befriend each other through the wire of Auschwitz concentration camp leave… Read more

We have long been aware of the dangers of home for women but to discover that the house of our nation, Parliament House is also a perilous place, is a different and distressing revelation. While hardly surprising, the rape allegation of staffer Brittany Higgins and those which have followed, has… Read more

‘In 1623 when seriously ill, John Donne, the English poet wrote ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’. This insight, that we are all interconnected is as true today as it was then. More recently, experimental psychologist… Read more

What if they can hear me? The sanctity and privacy of the therapeutic conversation has been an underpinning principal to the extent that it is enshrined in ethical guidelines that protect clients from breaches of confidentiality by practitioners. More difficult is managing the curiosity of family members when sessions are… Read more