Stuart Mitchell – författare

This book offers practical suggestions for how to grow a trauma informed approach and culture within acute mental health services. It starts by building a compassionate understanding of the challenges faced by people receiving, and delivering, care in inpatient settings. It considers the (understandable) ways in which individuals and services have adapted to cope, and what this means for patient care and staff wellbeing. It then offers suggestions relevant to individual clinicians, teams and organizations, aiming to help all readers feel more hopeful, empowered, and equipped.The clinical focus is crisis and inpatient care for people with 'complex emotional needs', where there is a need to build (multidimensional) safety for all involved - patients, but also those caring for them. Some systemic challenges are recognized and discussed, including fear of blame, task focus, fast pace, and increasing clinical acuity. The book makes links between trauma informed care and workforce capacity and wellbeing, organizational culture, mentalizing, and compassion.The book covers all stages of an acute care pathway, including safety planning, crisis care, hospital admission, ward-based intervention, and discharge, with an overarching focus on realistic expectations, attachment-focused interventions, and emotion-regulation skills building. Several therapeutic models, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), and Mentalization-Based Therapy (MBT) are drawn upon and applied to clinical examples, to help readers integrate understandings and ideas into their everyday clinical practice. The book incorporates lived experience comments from patients and clinicians, and brings the material to life for busy readers through core concept boxes, clinical scenarios, and bullet point summaries.

Structured clinical management (SCM) is a unified approach to the treatment of people with personality disorder, which is within reach of general mental health professionals without extensive additional training. However, implementation can be fraught with difficulties, and clinical leads, managers, and practitioners can struggle to implement SCM across complex mental health systems. This book provides an easy to read, practical, and detailed guide on how mental health services can implement SCM in their current clinical pathways and how clinicians can transform their general techniques into a coherent interventional approach for people with personality disorder. Containing insights from clinical experts, researchers, service users, and practitioners of SCM from across the UK and Europe, each chapter outlines a core aspect of the SCM model and its delivery in clinical services. Detailed case studies demonstrate real-world applications of the SCM model, and details are provided about the involvement of carers and families, along with tips on enhancing clinical outcomes and increasing service user engagement.This book will be a valuable resource for qualified and in-training mental health professionals, including psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, and psychiatrists. It is particularly relevant to those involved in delivering first-line treatments to people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and other personality difficulties.

Counterinsurgency is defined as efforts to defeat and confine a rebellion against a constituted authority. While it has become a buzz-word in the last twenty years, it is as old as society itself. This concise history discusses the development of modern counterinsurgency over the last two hundred years, beginning with the origins of modern insurgency from the concept of ‘small wars’ and colonial warfare, through the ideas of early insurgents including Clausewitz and the theories of Lawrence of Arabia, to the methods of 20th-century insurgents, including Mao and Che Guevara.It then examines a number of post-1945 insurgencies and how western armies have tried to counter them, in particular how the French tried to counter insurgencies in Indochina and Algeria, and then the US in Vietnam, and the reaction to the American experience there. This is compared with the British approach in the years after World War II, particularly in Malaya, but also in Kenya and Northern Ireland. Against that backdrop there is an examination of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of COIN literature, and the subsequent backlash against that literature. The book concludes with a discussion on the future of COIN.