Councelling Children and Young People
“I wish every educational psychologist, behaviour support practitioner and head teacher could internalise the messages in this DVD”
First Response is a very well crafted package, powerful and effective. For many young people, grief reactions are managed within appropriate support systems but a significant minority experience maternal abandonment, domestic violence, mental ill-health or disability. For some, losses can be multiple and at times too much to bear if warmth, empathy or understanding are lacking. The materials highlight how a wide variety of losses from death to disability impact across time on the feelings, thinking and behaviours of young people. Connections between a young person’s presentation and an earlier loss are not always obvious to practitioners.
Young people often re-experience grief at significant transitions when the emptiness is especially painful, but don’t always make the connection to earlier losses. I wish every educational psychologist, behaviour support practitioner and head teacher could internalise the messages in this DVD. Teacher training courses need this as core material and youth offending teams would find it especially useful. Our high school classrooms feel under siege from angry, disenfranchised kids – teachers cry out for anger management when what we need is compassionate and informed understanding of the multiple impact of loss and grief on the lives and families of young people and ways to offer them effective support. This material doesn’t replicate what’s already out there from Winston’s Wish, the Childhood Bereavement Trust and Cruse but plugs a gap by throwing into sharp relief the impact of significant loss on all five outcomes of Every child matters. The target audience is practitioners working with children and young people, not just counsellors/ psychotherapists. The language is accessible to a wide range of practitioners. I felt it addressed older children’s needs much better than those of younger children however.
Previous bereavement awareness would enhance the understanding as this packs its punches by rapid-fire visuals with voice-over headlines on normal and abnormal grief reaction behaviours. Chapter 1 flashes delayed and inhibited grief, acute grief, bereavement overload, and disenfranchised grief straight at you. Each of these is a specialist area of practice but the DVD is clear that these are areas to be aware of in case of the need to refer on. Subsequent chapters in Part One cover forms of loss, why we grieve, the journey of grief, and possible consequences of unresolved grief. In Part Two, I liked the way it spoke of the ‘first response’ that all frontline practitioners can offer: active listening, sensitive pacing, regard to safe practice for the young person, and professionalism. The authors, Bill Merrington and Lee Rogerson have solid credentials in working with young people whose lives have been disrupted through loss. The DVD format introduces us to a limited cast of characters: young people and practitioners who highlight the main points of this work, hook you into their stories and make an impact in the way that pure theoretical material just doesn’t for me. The manual and video are cross-referenced but not identical.
I would definitely recommend this material as part of a more extensive bereavement and loss resource, especially for those working with already vulnerable children.
Sarah Catchpole, CAMHS clinician with bereavement lead, BACP (Accred), CCYP executive
Review from the CCYP Journal, November 2006
