Welcome to our reviews of books in counselling, psychotherapy, psychology and related fields.
This is a rigorous scholarly text dedicated to a very real social problem, and it does try to identify successful and unsuccessful community and state-wide attempts to prevent or reduce youth problems. It doesn’t pretend to be a self-help book or parenting manual, or indeed a profound philosophical or political analysis.
This book is a good ready-to-go manual for the new or busy coach looking for new ideas or reinforcement of practice enthusiasm. Whether it lives up to its promise of providing lasting solutions is something that only time and longitudinal research studies can tell.
At a time when Complementary and Alternative Therapies have (again) been under fire from some university scientists for falsely claiming scientific status, and in an era of evidence-based psychotherapy, this book is a key text. It should have a place on all postgraduate counselling and psychotherapy courses, but I suspect it will not be so readily accommodated.
Comprehensive, clear and well referenced, this guide to the theory and practice of dealing with ambiguous loss — loss without closure — provides a realistic hope, not that we will “get over it”, but that it is possible to live with the uncertainty and the unknown.
If you’re not familiar with — or even wary of — brief or time-limited approaches to counselling, this book provides a comprehensive introduction that could challenge your way of thinking. The whole theory behind brief therapy is in fact an incentive to be present, to check everything out with the client, not to let things slide, hoping that they will come up later. The time is now!
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