A key theme of this book is that we urgently need a therapeutic ethos in order to bring both educational and therapeutic sensibilities to bear on the issue of children's wellbeing, if truly effective and appropriate policy responses to the current malaise are to be fashioned. Not least, we must pay particular attention to childhood experience, showing that scientific and technical developments are always secondary to the resources of the human soul, if we are to minimize the extent to which today's children will need therapy as adults. This will entail moving beyond narrowly mechanistic definitions of, and ways of thinking about, "well-being" and the psychological therapies. This book offers pointers to the kinds of arguments that can inform what is rapidly becoming a central concern of politicians and policy-makers.A unique book in the field, "Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos" will be core cross-disciplinary reading in a range of academic and training contexts, including within education, psychology and sociology departments, on early childhood studies and policy studies modules and degrees, and on child and other psychotherapy and counselling trainings.

This book draws together radical critiques of therapy and shows how therapists have become too willing administrators of the mind, and how they then delight in the bureaucratic management of therapeutic practice.

This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the present state and the future of Humanistic Psychology, showcasing a rich international contributor line-up. The book addresses head-on the current state of a world in crisis, not only placing the current conjuncture within a wider evolutionary context, but also demonstrating the specifically humanistic-psychological values and practices that can help us to transform and transcend the world's current challenges. Each chapter looks in depth at a variety of issues: counselling and psychotherapy, creativity and the humanities, post-traumatic stress, and socio-political movements and activism. The book amply confirms that Humanistic Psychology is as alive, and as innovative and exciting, as it ever has been, and has tremendous relevance to the uncertainties that characterize the unprecedented individual and global challenges of the times. It celebrates the diverse and continuing significance of Humanistic Psychology by providing a robust and reliable roadmap for a new generation of counsellors and psychotherapists. In these richly diverse chapters will be found inspiration, pockets of resistance, mature critical reflexivity and much much more - a book accurately reflecting our present situation, and which is an invaluable addition to the psychology literature.

This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the present state and the future of Humanistic Psychology, showcasing a rich international contributor line-up. The book addresses head-on the current state of a world in crisis, not only placing the current conjuncture within a wider evolutionary context, but also demonstrating the specifically humanistic-psychological values and practices that can help us to transform and transcend the world's current challenges. Each chapter looks in depth at a variety of issues: counselling and psychotherapy, creativity and the humanities, post-traumatic stress, and socio-political movements and activism. The book amply confirms that Humanistic Psychology is as alive, and as innovative and exciting, as it ever has been, and has tremendous relevance to the uncertainties that characterize the unprecedented individual and global challenges of the times. It celebrates the diverse and continuing significance of Humanistic Psychology by providing a robust and reliable roadmap for a new generation of counsellors and psychotherapists. In these richly diverse chapters will be found inspiration, pockets of resistance, mature critical reflexivity and much much more - a book accurately reflecting our present situation, and which is an invaluable addition to the psychology literature.

This radical and provocative book challenges the very foundations of therapy itself. In examining the hidden assumptions of therapy, the author poses the question 'Is therapy more concerned with preserving its own hegemony than with an honest authenticity of procedure and practice?'

In this book Dr Hardtmuth chronicles the takeover of the medical field by private companies and corporations over the past decades, bringing the profit motive and conflicts of interest into health care to such an extent that there is a growing alienation of the helping professions from their own core identity. Human care, attention and appropriate help are increasingly hindered by the specifications and supposed constraints of economic logic and rationality…. The one-sided profit orientation has not only brought corruption into the health field; Hardtmuth further illustrates how income inequalities and inappropriately applied economic rationality are correlated with illnesses in people as well as ‘illnesses’ in wider society and the environment. Independent thinking, courage and reflection are urgently needed on the core value of a civil society based on mutual support…. In the Afterword, Dr House describes how a separation of economic, political and cultural/spiritual life (which includes health-care) is urgently needed and how a number of initiatives have recently been started which point in this direction.

In Beyond Mainstream Medicine, Thomas Hardtmuth, M.D. and Richard House, Ph.D. dive deeply into the very foundations of human well-being, exhaustively detailing what is wrong philosophically and clinically with the current prevailing biomedical paradigm of health and disease; how these shortcomings have been highlighted in the course of the Covid crisis; and what changes need to occur for the radical re-founding of a genuinely holistic understanding of health, illness and healing to occur.

A MASTERWORK OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE SET IN THE ASHES OF WAR-TORN IRAQ, ITALY, AND AREAS IN BETWEEN.
"The Kills" is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books. It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body. Moving across continents, characters, and genres and with the intelligence of John le Carre's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and the scope of Roberto Bolano's "2666," there will be no more ambitious or exciting novel published in 2014.

In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" challenges the foundations of many of therapy's most take-for-granted and self-serving assumptions. Yet despite its title, it is very far from being yet another anti-therapy book. Rather, the book's central aim is to retrieve what is best in therapy work from what Richard House sees as the pernicious and ultimately deadening forces of institutional professionalisation; credentialism and careerism; 'audit-culture' obsessions with 'evidence-based practice'; and the 'apolitical' psychopathologising of clients - concerns well captured by the term 'the ideology of modernity'. In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" assembles some 15 years of updated critical writings within the broad therapy field, with incisively provocative commentaries on the professionalisation process, the client voice, therapeutic education and training, and research. For practitioners who are highly sceptical about the beneficence of the state regulation of the psychological therapies, this book promises to be a rallying-point for the development of a 'post-professional' therapy culture.It will be indispensable reading for critical psychologists, and for therapists of all persuasions and modalities who value critical thinking and challenge, and who welcome the opportunity to step outside of therapy's conventional, taken-for-granted 'regimes of truth'.

This book offers both a wide range of critical perspectives from around the world, and substantial responses to them. It represents the first attempt to engage in print with the controversies and complexities that have exercised - sometimes painfully - the therapy and counseling world, as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) has risen to such cultural prominence as Western governments take a serious interest in the psychological therapies as instruments of public policy-making."Against and For CBT" will be essential reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and counselors of each and every approach who are concerned with understanding the phenomenon that is 'CBT and its discontents'. It will be core reading both on IAPT/CBT and contrasting modality training courses that wish to encourage critical engagement with the meaning and cultural context of therapeutic help in the modern world.Professor Andrew Samuels writes: 'This welcome new collection - provides us with many cogent and convincing arguments for, at the very least, questioning the epistemological underpinnings and the methodological validity of the 'evidence-based' ideology in which CBT and its supporters have become accustomed to basking - This splendid new book - promises to open up a crucial and long-overdue dialogue, and introduce the associated 'battle for the soul' of therapy work itself'. Professor Stephen Palmer writes: 'CBT is constantly developing , aquiring and integrating new ideas, many underpinned by research, and adapting to the requirements of the day. Unlike some approaches, it is not moribund, nor held back by dogma. Its commonsense, pragmatic approach will continue to have wide appeal, regardless of how it is viewed within the counseling and psychotherapy professions.

Richard House's startling debut, Bruiser, is a spare yet lyrical love story about people who can't fall in love. "Supple, deep, perfectly regulated, full of high, shy intelligence and cool, sweet wit, Bruiser is an amazing novel". -- Dennis Cooper