The Child and Family Refugee Service at the Tavistock Centre in London has run a series of 'Tree of Life' groups for both parents and children in schools. The groups were developed in response to a concern about the majority of psychological treatments, which focus predominantly on vulnerability factors in refugee populations, and the effect that this can have on those they are attempting to help. In addition, these are modelled on western assumptions, which do not adequately take account of culture. The Tree of Life groups have provided an alternative to traditional mental health services, which many refugee families find hard to access because of perceived stigma and lack of knowledge about what is on offer. The groups employed a strength-based narrative methodology, using the tree as a creative metaphor, which enabled parents and children to develop empowering stories about their lives, which were rooted in their cultural and social histories. From this secure base, participants were able to develop shared, culturally congruent solutions to their problems. The groups have been found to benefit parents and children alike, as well as the school communities in which they have taken place.
Our object in this paper is to study the temperature variations in the Antarctic Peninsula using multiple regression models with correlated errors admitting ARMA models with nonGaussian innovations. We found that the fitted models adequately describe the variations. The data we consider are minimum/maximum monthly temperatures recorded at the Faraday station by the British Antarctic Survey for the period from January 1951 to December 1995. The time series models considered here are novel in the sense that the linear ARMA models have innovations which have extreme value distributions, and the maximum likelihood estimation described here can be widely used in many disciplines.The time series models we fitted indicate that the mean of the minimum temperatures is likely to increase over the next 50 years and the temperatures will be above 0 o C during the summer months which means that the melting season will increase, creating more climatic and ecological problems. Although the mean temperature is reported to have increased by 2.5 o C we believe that the maximum temperatures have remained unchanged over the past 45 years. This has led to a decrease in the diurnal temperature range which has also been observed in many other parts of the globe.The influence of human activity on climate is still unknown but our ability to perturb the ozone layer is an established fact. We established a relationship between minimum monthly temperatures and ozone levels and found they are highly negatively correlated (at a lag of one month) implying that the higher levels of ozone in the air keep temperatures low. This resulted in a new time series model relating the minimum temperatures to ozone levels. After appropriate statistical tests, we have come to the conclusion that the observed increase in the minimum temperatures is a consequence of human activity rather than natural causes and so a reduction in the production of "greenhouse gases" could lead to a decrease in minimum temperatures, thereby reducing the adverse effect of global warming in the Antarctic Peninsula.
This article describes the experience of setting up a psychosocial and therapeutic support project in the French Calais refugee camp, by a group of family therapists and clinical psychologists from the United Kingdom. This came about in response to reports of a humanitarian crisis unfolding on our doorstep, with the British government's lack of support for the growing numbers of refugees gathering along the UK border with France. The project involved working alongside other agencies in the camp to provide psychosocial and resilience-based therapeutic support to unaccompanied young people, women, children and their families and also to many volunteers in the camp. The process of setting up the work is described, as well as the challenges and dilemmas of offering an intervention in extremely unsafe and insanitary conditions, where for most the experience of trauma was ongoing. The project was informed by systemic-narrative practice and community/liberation psychology, which incorporate the political and social context. A narrative framework offered a way of drawing on people's strengths and resources, rooted in their cultural and social histories and helping them connect with preferred identities, which we found to be essential in the context of ongoing crisis.
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