Routledge Journals is offering free access to a collection of over 55 articles on the topic of Diversity & Cultural Psychiatry. You can now view and download each of these articles for free, but the offer is only open for a limited time.
For more information visit the Free Article Collection at Taylor and Francis Online here.
Expires July 31, 2015.
Te Pou is pleased to launch Towards restraint free mental health practice: Supporting the reduction and prevention of personal restraint in mental health inpatient settings. This resource is the latest in a suite of work aimed at reducing and preventing the use of seclusion and restraint. Services can use this resource to plan and identify best practices that support a least restrictive approach to service delivery.
Contact:
Te Pou
Level 2, Building B, 8 Nugent Street, Grafton, Auckland 1023.
Telephone: +64 9 373 2125www.tepou.org.nz
Due to popular demand, new versions of “Oranga Ngākau – Getting the most out of Mental Health and Addiction Services: A recovery resource for service users” and “When someone you care about has a mental health or addiction issue” are available in hard copy or by download.
“Oranga Ngākau” is easy to understand and provides valuable information about what to expect from treatment in mental health and addiction services. This includes a glossary of terms used during care, as well as describing different possible scenarios when using these services for the first time.
“When someone you care about has a mental health or addiction issue” is a resource for those who are supporting others. Read about the best ways for family, whānau and friends to help people close to them who are in care, as well as how to find support for themselves, should they need it.
Contact:
Kim Higginson, Information Officer, Mental Health Foundation
info@mentalhealth.org.nz
This week to attain, maintain or regain your sense of wellbeing...
...practice laughter yoga every day. Laughter yoga is the practice of deliberate, voluntary laughter. The idea is that forced laughter soon turns into real laughter and has the same benefits for body, mind and mood that spontaneous laughter does. Laughing on purpose can help us learn how to create laughter from the inside and how to use laughter to shift our moods, rather than waiting for our moods to shift before we can laugh. It's also another way to shift our breathing and create a state of relaxation without being focused on our breath. Laughter yoga is usually practiced in groups. We get the most benefit if we can laugh vigorously for 20-30 minutes, according to Laughter Yoga Aotearoa New Zealand. Natural laughter usually comes in bursts and this why practicing in groups can help. But there's no reason why we can't also practice laughter yoga alone, using a few simple exercises to get us started.
This week, schedule time to practice laughing for no reason, without needing something ‘out there’ or external to yourself to make you laugh. It might help to start with just a few minutes and build up to 10, then 20. If you live with other people, you might also need to give them a heads up to expect to hear some loud laughter coming from your room for a while - they might even want to join you. Laughter yoga is something that can wake your body up, so don't schedule your practice time right before bed, unless you find that it tends to make you feel relaxed and tired afterwards. It will probably feel strange to do this at first, but that's okay. This week, give yourself permission to be silly for a brief time each day.That's a good practice in itself.
To practice laughter yoga, try these simple exercises that involve forced, extending laughing.
1. Take a Laughter Drink
Standing up straight, feet hip-width apart, raise one hand in front of you as if I are holding an imaginary (and bottomless) cup full of laughter. Take a deep breath into the bottom of your belly, then 'pour' the laughter into your mouth for the entire out-breath. As you tip the 'cup' into your mouth and breath out, force yourself to laugh out loud as you 'pour' more of the laughter out of the cup. Repeat this for ten breaths in and ten breaths out, trying to pour more and more laughter out of the cup each time.You can imagine the cup is full of different kinds of laughter - the light, giggling laughter is floating on the top, the deepest belly laughter is sitting on bottom. When you tip the cup to your mouth, start with light tee-hees and move through the whole range of laughs until you get to the loudest, deepest ha-ha-has. With each breath or 'cup', try to laugh for a little bit longer.
2. Laughter Balloons
Standing with your back straight and your feet hip-width apart, place both palms flat on your belly and imagine you are holding a giant, empty balloon against your stomach. This time, on the first out-breath your laughter will fill the balloon, until your arms are stretched out in a circle in front of you. Then, take a deep breath in and slowly release the laughter out of the balloon on your next out-breath, laughing out loud until the balloon is emptied and your palms are once again flat on your belly. Repeat this two-step process five to ten times, aiming to laugh for longer each time.
3. Laughter Hand-Ball
Standing with your back straight and your feet hip-width apart, facing a wall, pretend you have a laughter ball in your hands. Take a deep breath in and on the out-breath, 'throw' the ball at the wall with a burst of laughter, and 'catch' the ball when it bounces back with another burst of laughter. The louder your laugh, the faster the ball will travel. Experiment with a different kind of laughter each time.
4. Laughter Body Fill
Standing with your back straight and your feet firmly grounded on the floor, this time, your laughter will fill your body. Imagine each in-breath fills a different part of your body with the energy to laugh. On each out-breath, laugh out loud from that part of your body, starting with your toes, legs, stomach, chest, shoulders, nose and the top of your head.
If you work up to spending five minutes on each exercise, you'll eventually be doing 20 minutes of yoga laughter a day. As you move through the week, observe how this affects your body and moods.
Once you are comfortable using yoga laughter at an everyday kind of time, add it to your Personal Coping Kete as a way of coping during times of stress and distress. Doing some laughter yoga could allow you to take a break from distressing thoughts, shift your body's physical stress responses and release some of your brain's happy chemicals.
The Ministry of Health will soon release the national COPMIA guideline, currently in draft.
This guideline will outline the responsibilities all mental health and addiction services have to the children of parents with mental illness and or addiction (COPMIA) and their families and whānau. For some, this is going to mean a big shift in the way that services operate. The guideline envisions a mental health and addiction sector that is inclusive of family and whānau, focusses on strengths, and promotes and protects the wellbeing and rights of children. It promotes early intervention in the lives of children to support resilience, offering evidenced based and culturally appropriate ways of working, and across sector partnerships to meet the needs of children and their families and whānau.
For more information click on this link to Te Pou.
Or contact Mark Smith at Te Pou
Phone number: 07 857 1278
Mobile number: 027 687 7127
1. First, think about what compassion means to you. If you find it difficult to be compassionate towards yourself, it might help to think of what another compassionate person might do, or even what you are like when you are being compassionate towards other people. Think about what you might need from your compassionate self and what compassion involves for you. Is your compassionate self forgiving, respectful, kind, aware of what is important to you, caring, accepting, warm, humorous or all of those things and more? What does your compassionate self think about making mistakes, flaws, limitations, weaknesses, failures, and negative life events?
2. The next step is building a visual image for your compassionate self. What does your compassionate self look like? They could look like someone who has treated you with compassion in the past, a creature you have found comforting or it could look like you when you are being compassionate, understanding and kind to someone you care about. Think about what facial expressions and gestures your compassionate self might make to show their empathy, understanding and warmth and what it feels like to be near that. How does your compassionate self look at you? What do they do when they see you suffer?
3. Next you need to create a voice for your compassionate self. What does your compassionate self sound like? Think about what tone of voice it uses, what it sounds like, how loud its voice is and how fast it speaks. Finally, create some words for your compassionate self. What does your compassionate self say to you? Think about what words and phrases your compassionate self uses to soothe, show kindness and be understanding. It’ s easiest to do all this on a piece of paper, in writing or drawing, to make it concrete and give you something to come back to later.
Now you are ready to practice, take one to two minutes a day to sit mindfully with your thoughts about the day ahead and practice responding to them with this compassionate self you are learning to build inside you. Have a little conversation with them. What would this kind, accepting part of you say back to these thoughts and feelings you are holding right now? What would they offer you? How would they do it? Whenever you notice other thoughts distracting you, describe them to yourself, respond to them using your compassionate self and return to visualising yourself talking to my compassionate self about the coming day.
Once you are familiar with visualising your compassionate self and responding to your thoughts with a compassionate voice, add “Call on Your Compassionate Self” to your Personal Coping Kete as a way of coping with stress and distress. You will be able to call on the compassionate part of yourself to support yourself through stressful times with soothing, kind, respectful and understanding words, ideas and images, instead of being pushed along by your mind’ s negative self-talk on autopilot.
Think Differently, led by the Ministry of Social Development, is a social change campaign that seeks to encourage and support a fundamental shift in attitudes and behaviours towards disabled people.
It works across community and national level activities to mobilise personal and community action, to change social attitudes and beliefs that lead to disabled people being excluded, and to increase people’s knowledge and understanding of disability and the benefits of inclusive communities. To support this work, Think Differently commissioned a review of the published and grey literature to understand the factors that cause disabled people to be socially excluded. The review is designed to inform the further development of the Think Differently Campaign. This summary focuses on understanding social exclusion and its key drivers. The methods and a more detailed analysis of the key concepts are provided in the main body of this report.
