Dr Nina Jones and Jonathan Ruchpaul are in the final stages of incorporating the Bristol Family Therapy Collective, a community interest company that will facilitate the delivery of family therapy on a pro bono basis so that families (or the couples or individuals involved within it) who would struggle to find the resources to benefit from family therapy will be able to be funded, or partly funded by fee-paying clients who are in a position to contribute.

To get an idea of what family therapy might address, just think of the complexities that go to make a family (of whatever shape or form), and of all the relationships and individuals involved in it. Then think of all the circumstances that life will inevitably impose upon those individuals and their relationships, and the breadth of the subject becomes more clear. Families change and develop and, of course, just one cause can have many effects within them so finding a way to identify and address these may need expert help.

Community Interest Companies are limited companies which operate to provide a benefit to the community they serve. Their purpose is primarily one of community benefit so the ethos of the Bristol Family Therapy Collective speaks for itself.

Nina can be contacted here: ninajones.bftc@gmail.com

NHS 111 has joined Scotland and Wales in offering mental health advice and practical help alongside the ‘physical’ advice and help available previously.

This is obviously a step in the right direction as the NHS is not able to cope with the prompt provision of mental health services. The charity MIND estimates that about two million people are on NHS mental health services waiting lists.

The service is also able to offer advice and practical help for children.

111, mental health option, will now put people in touch with trained call handlers, mental health nurses and clinicians, at any time of day or night, and there is a talking-therapy service too which is available through nhs.uk.

The Balloon Festival is Bristol’s biggest outdoor event and has had to weather (forgive the pun) a series of wet and windy festival dates and from unforeseen ‘show stoppers’ like the COVID pandemic, so it was a treat to see the balloons drifting over the suspension bridge, over the Harbourside Practice and on towards Hanham and Bath on Saturday 10 August 2024. 

A characteristically Bristol event and the opportunity associate Redcliffe and the Practice with it.

We’ve recently finished updating the Harbour room. The sink and the tired tub chairs have gone and new chairs, pictures, and paint have given the room a clean and contemporary look but retained its confidential and comfortable character.

The new pictures – all of Bristol or its surrounds – are by local artist Emy Lou Holmes.

Emily lives and works in Bristol. She creates illustrations of local towns and cities and retro-inspired images. The pictures reflect her interest in 60s & 70s aesthetics and she collects vintage fabrics and wallpapers to collage into her work.

We like the ‘local-ness’ of the pictures and the fact that they are somehow contemporary despite the retro inspiration.

The new rooms in our sister practice in the top half of the house are now complete and, just like  the rooms downstairs, are already providing a credible, professional and attractive place for our practitioners and their clients to engage.

There are three new talking rooms and another room set aside for therapists to use as a common room.

The new skylight, specially commissioned to provide a colourful and varied light, sheds a warm glow over the top landing.

Soundproofing has been a big investment but is working well; even the new fire doors have a special sound proofing bar that descends below the door and into the threshold as the door shuts. Silent sweep clocks and a double door finish off our attempts to make the rooms as conducive as we can…

 

Julie Gresty used her photography skills to capture this charming picture of a male blue tit feeding a female in the garden as she (hopefully) incubates a clutch of eggs. Blue tits apparently lay a large number of eggs, possibly as many as eleven or twelve so we’re looking forward to seeing the young birds soon.

In August 2018 Bristol’s planning department gave permission to use the top two floors in our building for counselling and psycho-therapeutic work. No. 3 Redcliffe Parade East is physically divided into two self-contained units and we have the downstairs two floors. The two upstairs floors will be a separate suite of 3 new counselling rooms and a waiting room and will bring a much needed resource to Redcliffe, the city centre, and southern Bristol.

The planning process has delayed commissioning the new rooms which has had a knock-on effect, but they should be operational in the New Year, providing counselling rooms and a space for small groups (CPD  etc).  We look forward to it.

Mike Rome is an artist who used to live only about 250 yards from the Practice so the new picture that now hangs in the Waiting room and which was originally spotted in the Tobacco Factory couldn’t really be more local.

With Pablo Reina soon to be joining the Practice we now have five languages other than English that are available for those people who feel more comfortable conversing in their native language.

Working in the native tongue is obviously an advantage because a second language (pretty much no matter how fluent) represents an obstruction that has to be overcome and when it comes to communicating, especially in a therapeutic setting, the easier, the more fluent and therefore more direct the process is, the better the understanding. And it’s not just the language that facilitates the exchange; native language sits within a shared cultural background which includes much more than a common and familiar knowledge of a country and background. Gesture and all the other subtle non-verbal aspects of communication flourish between native speakers so the process is simply that much more fluent.

So who speaks what at the Practice?

Bulgarian: Milena Nikolova, mainly working with Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and of course counselling.

Czech: Pavla Radostova, mainly working in an integrative way which means that she offers a range of styles and techniques.

French: Jessica Wallace, a certified Clinical Hypnotherapist with a Transpersonal approach

German (and Spanish): Claudia Schmidt, a Chartered Counselling Psychologist working with individuals and couples

Polish: Renata Königsman, using an Integrative approach but mainly using Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Spanish: Pablo Reina: counselling with a humanistic approach; about to complete a diploma in Integrative Counselling.

Following a discussion at the Practice about some of the ways that depression can be addressed it was surprising how little mindfulness was mentioned. Bearing in mind that it is so very effective and bearing in mind that it can be ‘pharma-free’ and that it’s been around for so long – a few thousand years in its traditional form and about 20 years in its modern form wedded to CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) –  and that it’s effective against some relapse, it should have been at the forefront of the discussion. It’s certainly one of the most prominent treatments and has even been called ‘fashionable’ (in which case it is a very classic fashion) which rather ignores the unusually convincing and solid evidence base.

A really good introduction to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and one that can be listened to, rather than read, is provided in a series of podcasts by Prof Mark Williams of Oxford Uni’s Mindfulness Research Centre. He and Dr Danny Penman explore what depression is, what mindfulness and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is, and its effectiveness as a treatment, backed up with research and evidence.

If you have access to an mp3 player the series is really worth a listen and, of course, you don’t have to be depressed to benefit from being mindful; listen to this series and you’ll see what we mean.

The New Psychology of Depression:   https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/new-psychology-depression