Self-isolation, week four

It reminds me of when I was unemployed, having all this free time. But it's weird - instead of bumming around playing videogames all day and moderating meaningless internet forums, this time I am spending my time improving my situation. I asked Twitter when the lockdown first started if this crisis brought anyone's mortality into sharp focus. It did mine.…

L3CiCS Learning Log – 10th April 2020

The purpose of this piece of work is to examine what is meant by research and how it informs and supports counselling work. What is research? Research is a lot of different things depending on the context. Pure research is more like exploring and finding out more information about something. Applied research is directed by a hypothesis or the desire…

L3CiCS Homework – 10th April 2020

This week, as an introduction to the everyday use of research, we were asked to brainstorm how we would research buying a car. Quite handily, I have been researching buying a car for a while now, so the ideas should flow quite easily. I may even discover more aspects of research that I could include in my car hunt. I…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 10th April 2020

Research is an interesting aspect of counselling and psychotherapy, and I think it is very important. It is essentially a sphere of knowledge that exists parallel to your own body of knowledge as a person and as a counsellor, and overlaps in places. Research, or “finding out what works” has created talking therapies and its different modalities and theories, and…

Self isolation, week three

Last week went a bit quicker than the first week of isolation - but I put that down to not being on high alert in terms of anxiety the whole week. It's reared it's head again, but I'm slowly reeling it back in as things settle down. Looking back to the first week, I was neurotic. Overthinking. Fell to the…

L3CiCS Reflective Diary – 3rd April 2020

This week we looked at common mental health problems and possible reasons for their incidence in society. Mental health problems could be seen as skewed rules that people are trying to live their lives by. These abstract rules are mostly developed alongside the organism as it grows and learns to navigate this world we live in. These self-created rules form…

L3CiCS – Learning Log – 3rd April 2020

This week we were learning about Common Mental Health Problems. As categorised by The National Institute for Health Care Excellence (NICE), the most common mental health problems include depression and anxiety disorders such as generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is worth noting that it is possible to have more than one…

Self isolation, week one

You may have heard something about the coronavirus, I'm not sure if it's on the news yet... Oh, who am I kidding, it's everywhere. You can't have not heard about it by now, it's affecting absolutely everything. We're self isolating this week because Jake developed a cough the night before he was due to go back to school - we…