News & Insights

Scream and Yell and You’ll Feel Better… or Will You? Catharsis theory, derived from the Greek word katharsis, meaning to cleanse or purge, suggests that “acting aggressively or even viewing aggression is an effective way to purge angry and aggressive feelings”. This links directly back to Freud who proposed that… Read more

Four-year-old Tharnicaa, an Australian born child of Tamil Sri Lankan parents, spent her fourth birthday in hospital being treated for pneumonia and sepsis and every previous one in detention on Christmas Island. Again, we are confronted with the reality of detaining children and the question of whether this is a… Read more

The psychological literature on the impact of living with domestic violence presents a singular view which asserts that these conditions produce emotional dysregulation and incompetence in children. Emotional dysregulation is proposed as the link between exposure to violence and psychosocial difficulties. By contrast authors, Callaghan et al (2017) conducted a… Read more

“Innocent sleep. Sleep that soothes away all our worries. Sleep that puts each day to rest. Sleep that relieves the weary laborer and heals hurt minds. Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing.” (Shakespeare MacBeth) We all know the value of a good night’s sleep and… Read more

A gift this ANZAC day was the announcement by the federal government that, after five years of campaigning, the parliament has backed a motion to support a Royal Commission into the personal cost of service for Australians. The suicide rate, which has outstripped that of deaths in active duty since… Read more

Filicide, the murder of a child by their parent is perhaps one of the most distressing events for a community to face. Recently we have been confronted by news reports of a father who jumped to his and his infant’s death off a dam wall. Why do they do it?… Read more

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