WELCOME!  For All That

A web-site for demystification ...
... of the helping professions and life!

Recent Highlights!
> A compact Children Resisting Contact Page
And a concise comprehensive overview of Alienation. 
> Regular blogging on: the alienation experience.
> Equalism and: Keeping one eye on family abuse is not enough.
> Roughlective Practice: Programme, Concepts, Handout, Cardiff Notes, Liverpool Notes                 > And some poems 

Click for my best attempt to think this through on equalism.org.uk

Click on the cup for a relaxed version of the forallthat message … insert your own religion's text at the end!

A Man's a Man for A' That
"For All That" - the name of this, Nick Child's, website about demystification - is a reference to Robert Burns' poem 'A Man's a Man for A' That'. That poem is about seeing through appearances to the human beneath. Demystification does that too. 

Confusion and Demystification
Nick's life began in experiences of confusion. His life's theme has been demystification. Nick aims to write a book. Having put off doing it in a big way, he  has now "published" a small virtual one - here (Feb 2010) is the text of: "Ben and The Futurescope"    That is the most succinct introduction to Nick and his story behind this website about confusion and demystification.

The theme of demystification of the helping professions emphasises ordinary good practice. Ordinary good practice best gives and gets clients and workers their humanity and life - "life" as in the phrase "get a life". You know when you take a step to "getting a life" because you'll "get it" - it clicks with you, it moves you. Until Spring 2014, Nick fought a losing battle in the field of family therapy to name this "systemic practice". Now he calls it "roughlective practice" but his workshop has not yet been turned into an article (see links at top of page for clues).

As a doctor and psychiatrist, Nick's model of mental illness and health was multifactorial. That notion is the standard one for the profession, but in practice a more bio-scientific model dominates (see many articles here in For All That). Richard Bentall's article in the Guardian (26th Feb 2016) is a particularly clear and well-researched article - i.e. it is demystifying. It puts relationship experiences more clearly in the picture. 

Celebrating 10 Years
Since 2010, 10 years since For All That was launched, Nick has been refreshing it here but linking to the old version as he does it. Some of the links will take you to simple old-fashioned rather gaudy pages without obvious return tabs back to these new home pages. Nick is busier on other websites just now, but there is a lot of old material still to add to For All That. Do keep coming back. Do send a message to Nick on the contact form below.

Nick's Last Decade Plus ...
For All That was launched at the Connections in Practice conference in Stirling in March 2000. Nick's keynote speech there was on The Potential of Systemic Practice, a demystification of family therapy into good practice for social work (on that occasion). For an updated version of that keynote speech, download the article from Context 110 (Summer 2010). Nick retired from the NHS in 2003, and has been part of a voluntary sector family therapy team.

From 2010-14, Nick dedicated himself full-tilt to a campaign to explore every direction in which UK family therapy could go to expand the underdeveloped non-statutory sector in which he was working. Reviving an old email network to become Aspens, launched with Systemic Means Much More, he presented Learning from America Again, expanded webpages and websites for specific aspects of that (Couple Therapy and Parental Alienation; Relations Unlimited; Equalism; and Roughlective Practice), and organised further email groups, conferences and workshops (see e.g. Aspens Goes DAFT Plenary: On, In and Out the Box; Why do we dismiss Parental Alienation?; and, at EFTA in Istanbul, How Come Couple Therapy is Novel to Euro-FT?).

Since 2015 Nick campaigns full-time on high-conflict and alienating relationships of all kinds. The place to watch this happening is the alienation experience blog.

Papers
Some of Nick's papers that people commonly want to read are:
Family Therapy: The Rest of the Picture
Deficient Attention and Disordered Activity: Child Psychiatry's Response to ADHD
The Limits of the Medical Model in Child Psychiatry
The Potential of Systemic Practice: A Huge Army of Great Workers
Systemic Means Much More .. in the community and for other professions
      (or get a pdf version of SMMM here).
Quality Thinking and a Formula They Can't Refuse
Keeping One Eye on Family Abuse is Not Enough.

Dariusz Baran, systemic and family psychotherapist in Rzeszow, Poland, visited Motherwell way back. He shares the framework of working "in the peripheries of excellence" and has done Nick the honour of translating several of these papers into Polish. They're available here.

Briefly About Nick
Nick lives in Edinburgh. Trained in Edinburgh, he was a child and family psychiatrist in the Child and Family Clinic, Motherwell for 22 years. Retired in 2003, he likes to spread his time between family therapy, internet work, house, friends and family. But the webpages here help explain where he spends most of his time just now (2010 -14). See three other websites: thealienationexperience.org.uk , equalism.org.uk, and Salsa Ceilidh to see some more about his other work and fun. More about Nick here. And read Ben and The Futurescope of course.

Please use the contact box below to send in what you think.