David Robins

Social inequality and social disadvantage provide an all too fertile soil that sustains the majority of the serious mental health problems suffered by children in our society. The complexity of the issues clinicians routinely encounter in working with children with mental health problems is widely acknowledged. However, few books concern themselves with how such difficult populations can be effectively approached and the strategies that are likely to deliver effective treatment to them. This book, based on a highly successful seminar for grant-giving children's charities held at the Anna Freud Centre and sponsored by John Lyon's Charity, provides pragmatic solutions to this major therapeutic challenge of our age. The chapters bridge statutory and voluntary initiatives and are held firmly together by the commitment to evidence-based, systematically offered, programmatic and innovative approaches that can help those who, although hard to reach, are in greatest need of our efforts: the socially excluded children and families in our society. As such, this book will be invaluable to psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors and family therapists.

Cool Rules introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a serious, systematic analysis of Cool’s history, psychology, and importance.The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool’s ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and ‘60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flâneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and ‘90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society.

Once a group of young people (reformed street robbers) had a vision to transform their poor divided community. But the vision was tarnished by harsh reality, violent feuds and factional strife, corrupt and ineffective leaders, and youths involved in networks of criminality. Tarnished Vision is the story of the rise and fall of a utopian community project told against a background of crime and delinquency in a troubled neighbourhood. This vivid and authentic account of life in `Satellite City' is set in the 1980s, a decade when the promises of the enterprise culture failed to deliver, and the conditions were created for a generation hooked on crime. Tarnished Vision depicts the 1980s inner-city cycle of social tragedy followed by inept societal response, followed by social tragedy. But this is not only a story for the 1980s. The message is that programmes to save the inner cities, however well-resourced, cannot afford to ignore the destructive frustrations of urban male youths who are involved in crime. Community action programmes can be no more than window-dressing to camouflage these realities.