Witnessing and bearing witness. On offering systemic consultations and practices of solidarity at the Uyghur Tribunal

The experience of offering therapeutic support to the Uyghur Tribunal held in London in June and September 2021 powerfully brought home the critical variations in the meanings of witnessing and bearing witness and what they entail. In this paper, we explore the role of witnessing through offering systemic consultation to those who have experienced human rights violations and those who have witnessed these accounts and discuss our observations about the healing power of acts of resistance/activism. We are four systemic psychotherapists, with a particular interest in narrative practices, and approaches that foreground social justice. With a concern not to become “failed witnesses” which Jessica Benjamin (2014) describes as “a failure of those not involved in the acts of injury to serve the function of acknowledging and actively countering or repairing the suffering and injury that they encounter as observers in the social world”, we attempt here to communicate our experience of witnessing and joining with, through practices of solidarity, those bearing witness at the People's Tribunal held to hear evidence about China's alleged genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations

Children’s views of family relationships in lesbian-led families

We present a new genogram technique for exploring children's conceptualization of family membership: the Apple Tree Family (ATF). The ATF measure was used to investigate how children born to lesbian mothers via donor insemination (DI) described the composition of their family. Data were gathered from 17 children (age 4 to 11 years old) from 15 lesbian-led households on inclusion of family members on the ATF and the Kinetic Family Drawing Test (KFDT) (Burns & Kaufman, 1971). Also, data on children's inclusion of family members on the ATF were compared with family composition as described by adult family members in a prior interview. Child and adult family members tended to concur on who was in their family, depicting a core unit surrounded by a wider family network that included non-biological and biological kin. In comparison to the KFDT, the ATF enabled children to depict a greater number of family members in a wider variety of non-traditional family relationships. We propose that the ATF is useful as a research and clinical tool for working with the children of GLBTQ parents

Twenty years in the Himalaya,

"Camp life from a lady's point of view, by the Hon. Mrs. Bruce": p. 278-331.Mode of access: Internet

Feasibility, Acceptability, and Efficacy of Home-Based Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Pain in Older Adults with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias: A Randomized Sham-Controlled Pilot Clinical Trial

Although transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is emerging as a convenient pain relief modality for several chronic pain conditions, its feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy on pain in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) have not been investigated. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of 5, 20-min home-based tDCS sessions on chronic pain in older adults with ADRD. We randomly assigned 40 participants to active (n = 20) or sham (n = 20) tDCS. Clinical pain intensity was assessed using a numeric rating scale (NRS) with patients and a proxy measure (MOBID-2) with caregivers. We observed significant reductions of pain intensity for patients in the active tDCS group as reflected by both pain measures (NRS: Cohen’s d = 0.69, p-value = 0.02); MOBID-2: Cohen’s d = 1.12, p-value = 0.001). Moreover, we found home-based tDCS was feasible and acceptable intervention approach for pain in ADRD. These findings suggest the need for large-scale randomized controlled studies with larger samples and extended versions of tDCS to relieve chronic pain on the long-term for individuals with ADRD