Yoga and Autism: Making a Connection, by Nicole Schnackenberg

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How yoga can promote embodiment, connection, sensory integration, and anxiety-reduction in children

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Recent figures estimate that approximately 1% of the population in the United Kingdom has an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which is almost twelve times higher than estimates made in the 1970s. According to the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, individuals with autism experience communication difficulties alongside repetitive and restrictive behaviours and sensory hypo/hyper reactivity. Those of us who parent and work with children with autism, however, know this is only part of the story.

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Integrative Gestalt Practice: Transforming our ways of working with people, by Mikael Sonne and Jan Tønnesvang

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A new approach to understanding and working with complexity and wholeness in people’s lives

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Integrative Gestalt Practice (IGP) is a new framework and form of practice for understanding and working with complexity and wholeness in people’s lives. Amongst the many published books on the market today that are focusing on the need for specialization, manualization, and evidence-anchored methods, our book introduces an alternative approach to working professionally with people. By combining (selected) basic principles from the gestalt-approach with the integral model introduced by Ken Wilber, IGP develops a framework for integrating different forms of theoretical, empirical, and practical knowledge of human life-processes. As such IGP also introduces a framework for establishing dialogues across the many different schools of psychotherapy.

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How the experience of grief and loss shapes our world, by Vamık D. Volkan

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Life after Loss: The Lessons of Grief

Cyprus 1964, printed 2013 Don McCullin born 1935 ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased with the assistance of the ARTIST ROOMS Endowment, supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Tate Members 2013 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/AR01184

I was born in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island, when it was a British colony. After completing my high school education there I went to Turkey for my medical education. In the summer of 1956 I finished Ankara University’s School of Medicine and six months later I came to the United States of America where I remained. During the last two and a half years of my life in Ankara, first as a rather poor medical student and then as a newly graduated physician, I shared a small room in an apartment complex with another Cypriot Turk named Erol. He had come to Ankara, as had I, for his medical education and was two classes below me at the same medical school. He called me “abi,” meaning “my big brother.” Since I only had sisters and no brother, I considered him to be my brother. During the time we were roommates, ethnic conflict began between the Cypriot Turks and Cypriot Greeks.

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What are the barriers and obstacles to adults learning? David Mathew explains the concept of ‘Fragile Learning’

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Adult Education: The Anxiety of Influence and the Influence of Anxiety

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Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety asks the reader to consider a wide variety of factors that might challenge an adult learner’s resilience or make the process of learning precarious and problematic. It is a book about anxiety (anxiety at the root of all learning); about barriers to adult learning, and about the situation that arises when the educator also becomes a Fragile Learner. Over fifteen chapters, the book discusses the various ways in which the processes and procedures of learning can be broken; and argues that it is much easier to break something than to fix it.

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The Journey: My Time with Cancer, by Patrick Casement

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Patrick Casement’s moving account of being diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma

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Preamble

Ever since I came out of hospital (three years ago) I have several times been asked if I would be writing up my experience of cancer. Until now I have always said that I would not do that, for several reasons. Although I have no problem in talking about my experience, my reluctance had mainly been because I did not want to alarm people. Not all cancer patients go through what I went through.

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Everyday Life and the Unconscious Mind: Hannah Curtis introduces psychoanalysis to a new audience

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How a greater understanding of unconscious processes in relationships benefits all of us

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Recently I attended an academic research conference at which the subject under discussion was mental health difficulties and treatment programmes. It was an interesting conference in many respects, and as always one of the most interesting aspects of it was the diversity of the academic research interests in this area and the variety of disciplines who are making a contribution to the field. It was the conversations that took place at coffee, lunch and tea that were equally as engaging as the more formal timetable.

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