In this population, the Diabetes Manual achieved a small improvement in patient diabetes-related distress and confidence to self-care over 26 weeks, without a change in glycaemic control. Further study is needed to optimize the intervention and characterize those for whom it is more clinically and psychologically effective to support its use in primary care.
The Leventhal model provides a useful framework within which to investigate children's knowledge and understanding of mental illness. Limitations of the study and implications for future research are discussed.
This paper reports two studies that investigated children's conceptions of mental illness using a naïve theory approach, drawing upon a conceptual framework for analysing illness representations which distinguishes between the identity, causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of an illness. The studies utilized semi‐structured interviewing and card selection tasks to assess 6‐ to 11‐year‐old children's conceptions of the causes and consequences (Study 1) and the curability and timeline (Study 2) of different mental and physical illnesses/ailments. The studies revealed that, at all ages, the children held coherent causal–explanatory ideas about the causes, consequences, curability, and timeline of both mental and physical illnesses/ailments. However, while younger children tended to rely on their knowledge of common physical illnesses when thinking about mental illnesses, providing contagion and contamination explanations of cause, older children demonstrated differences in their thinking about mental and physical illnesses. No substantial gender differences were found in the children's thinking. It is argued that children hold coherent conceptions of mental illness at all ages, but that mental illness only emerges as an ontologically distinct conceptual domain by the end of middle childhood.
This study aimed to explore the experiences of a group of counsellors regarding working with clients who engage in self-harming behaviour, in order to gain an understanding of what it is like to work with this client group. A series of six individual, semi-structured qualitative interviews were carried out, which were then transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. Counsellors' experiences were characterised by a number of themes, including the nature of self-harm, in terms of severity and vividness of description, stopping self-harm, incorporating social norms and therapeutic outcome, and organisational issues around balancing expectations from the agency, managing risk, and the counsellors' own working. Findings suggest that working with clients who self-harm raises significant challenges for counsellors in relation to organisational policy and/or context, the impact that working with this client group may have on the therapist themselves, while the issue of stopping self-harm, and how this might be communicated to the client, raises implications for the therapeutic relationship. Here, the supervisory relationship may offer an invaluable resource.
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