youth
Posted by Dulwich on Nov 27, 2016 in | 0 comments
Showing all 5 results
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Passing hope around: Youth messaging strategies for becoming drug-free— Warren Whyte
$9.90Collective narrative practice facilitates geographically separated groups of people to share their experience and wisdom in standing up to common problems. This article documents a particular collective narrative practice between a group of youth in prison at Burnaby Youth Custody Services and a group of youth in treatment for substance misuse at Peak House in Vancouver, Canada. The purpose of outlining this exchange of solution knowledges is to highlight certain practical and theoretical aspects of collective practices that were effective for the youth, in order to continue the narrative discussion for future practitioners. By assuming the youth had healing knowledges, by providing them with a relevant audience, and by offering them the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to others; this writer was able to facilitate young people in sharing their own solutions with each other in mutual encouragement against a common social issue. Exchanging collective narrative documents with other youth seemed to cultivate a sense of self-determination towards therapeutic work, a feeling of solidarity and belonging with similar strugglers, and a sense of hope and enthusiasm that change is indeed possible.
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The momentary hap of Bother— Jagur McEwan
$9.90This paper is many things, it started as a conference paper exploring what would happen, as community service workers, if we stepped away from language like the ‘complex needs client’, instead playing with an archetype such as the Rascal, the mischievous ‘trouble maker’, and seeing the Bother in trouble as a way to connect, to a journal piece that invites you into a liminal space I shared with one particular client in an LGBTIQA+ specialist organisation, who taught me how the dispossession of hope, which I came to acknowledge as her resistance, in the face of not being deeply seen, but wanting to connect with others, was cause for honour. This journey is peppered with Queering narrative approaches such as externalising, re-authoring and acknowledging the absent but implicit as acts of exorcising that which has been internalised, carving alternative identities and writing oneself back in from the margins, so endemic in the struggles of the collective LGBTIQA+ communities and our histories of erasure. Finally, it has become a reflection on my decentred practice; a love letter that strikes the blood of my work.
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How we deal with ‘way out thoughts’: A living document … Ways of talking with young people about suicidal thoughts— David Newman
$9.90In this paper, I describe some of the ways that I use the written word, in the form of ‘living documents’, to enable the sharing of stories and know-how about the ways young people deal with suicidal thoughts, or what are also termed ‘way out thoughts’ or ‘die thoughts’. These explorations take place in my work with young people in a psychiatric unit. I share here an example of a one-to-one conversation and also describe how I collect and use stories in a group work or collective context. The young people I speak with have let me know that such conversations and shared documents are important to them.
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First steps towards an alternative suicide risk screening tool: Navigating risk assessment and encouraging life-sustaining conversations— Carly Forster and Rina Taub
$9.90This paper explores preferred ways of working in relation to suicide screening in situations where this is a requirement of professional practice. We describe our concerns about how approaches to ‘suicide risk assessment’ were affecting our work and the young people we were required to assess. We came to see the assessment process as an intervention of itself, with the potential for negative consequences for young people, workers and the therapeutic relationship. In response, we drew on a narrative and post-structuralist framework to develop an alternative set of assessment questions. Our questionnaire is intended to scaffold conversations that externalise the problem, elicit people’s life-sustaining practices, and enable assessment of distress and suicidal thoughts. The questionnaire has so far been trialled by a young person and psychologist in Sydney, and an adult and mental health worker in Singapore. We present our findings about these insiders’ experiences of the questionnaire. We hope this article will invite readers to connect to curiosity about ways of having conversations that open up space for people to speak of despair, and questions about living, in ways that are respectful and encouraging of life-sustaining steps.
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Living like playing: Working with online gamers from a narrative therapy perspective — Mehmet Dinc
$9.90Many young people and their parents experience ongoing conflict about online gaming. These conflicts can lead to shame, distance and decreased self-esteem for young people. This paper explores the use of co-research, re-authoring, therapeutic documents and other narrative practices for working with young people experiencing issues with and conflict about online gaming.
Thank you to Tileah for a wonderful presentation. I love hearing the word “yarn” used in this powerful way (Americans also have that term). The practice of “translating”, of shifting concepts into language that can be more usefully heard, is very powerful. As coaches we can make good use of this to help clients uncover their hidden or forgotten resources.
These stories are amazing examples of what we can discover when we hold onto our “beginner’s mind” and remember that the other person (client, patient) has the information and understanding, not us. We talk a lot in leadership development about “co-creating” and I think this is a beautiful example of two very complementary roles: the person who has the story and the person who helps to explore and shape it.
I like the idea of narrative – there is something about giving people the power to create a narrative, rather than simply appearing in a story told by someone else. Within the narrative metaphor, I especially enjoy the fabric metaphor – the idea of strands. These may touch each other, or not, may go well together in tone or color, or not. But again, there is some power in creating and weaving the narrative.
In my own work with coaching and leadership development, I find that the emphasis on narrative(s) helps make things more tangible, and therefore brings them to their true scale, instead of letting them take on imaginary and unclearly described proportions.
I love this. Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger. Such a powerful sentiment. Sometimes through trauma, it is hard to access the words that really encapsulate that experience – though using the written word does help us access those hard to utter parts of our memories … in those cases though perhaps the story we tell ourselves is not one that makes us feel strong in the first instance – so finding a way to tell that story in a way that focuses on the strength of surviving to tell that story is just amazing!