Meet the CYP Team – Shirley Meade

by Shirley Meade | May 4, 2021 | Children and Young People, Meet the Counsellors, mental health, the spark, young people

Shirley Meade is a School Services Manager with The Spark. A qualified counsellor, she oversees the delivery of counselling and mental health support services for children and young people in schools across Scotland. We sat down with her to find out a bit more about...

Can anger be positive and useful?

by Robert Mawditt | Mar 22, 2021 | mental health

Anger gets bad press. It is linked with aggression and violence. Anger can get us into embarrassing scrapes or trouble. We feel very uncomfortable when we get angry and sometimes find it hard to manage. Often people will describe anger as a negative emotion, but...

Adolescence: 4 truths adults need to know

by Joanna Herman-Waddell | Feb 4, 2021 | Children and Young People, mental health, parenting, the spark, Tips, young people

Adolescence can be one of the most emotionally turbulent times in a person’s life; hormones, changing responsibilities, the rewiring of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and difficult social and emotional situations can all take a toll on the emotional...

Re-learning how to cope with loss and bereavement

by John Kennedy | Apr 29, 2021 | bereavement, grief, loss, mental health, the spark, Tips

We constantly live in a state of change and loss is sadly an inevitable part of that process. While we most often associate loss with bereavement, our lives are full of losses; jobs, relationships, or as we have all experienced recently, the loss of freedom and...

Self-harm: the truths and the myths

by Patrick Goodlet | Mar 1, 2021 | Children and Young People, mental health, self-harm, young people

Self-harm, or to give it it’s up to date classification ‘non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), is defined in the NHS dictionary as ‘deliberate injury to oneself, typically as a manifestation of a psychological or psychiatric disorder.’ Self-harm is basically behaviour...

Meet the Counsellor – Dorothy Jappy

by Dorothy Jappy | Feb 1, 2021 | counsellor, Meet the Counsellor, Meet the Counsellors, mental health, the spark

Continuing our new series ‘Meet the Counsellor’ we are talking to Dorothy Jappy – one of our Edinburgh counsellors – to find out more about her passion for therapy and why The Spark is such a respected counselling provider.   Each month we will be...