• Practicing self-compassion – kindness towards ourselves, an understanding of our common humanity, and mindfulness – can be an important contributor to the development of a positive body image.

• There are many ways to practice self-care that extend beyond grooming practices and may include nurturing our social relationships.

• Examining what it is that adds meaning to our lives and working to enhance our eudaimonic well-being can also enhance our body image.

Here, the focus of treatment broadens to encompass the importance of self-care strategies to encourage healthy hair and skin. The goal is to help clients to replace body damaging BFRB practices with ones that help restore and maintain hair and skin health. This entails changes in behaviors that do not directly impact hair and skin but serve the broader goals of emotional and physical well-being. The physical structure and characteristics of skin and hair are described in detail, as are the anatomy, functions, and requirements for their health. Approaches for managing BFRB-caused damage are described and a range of positive self-care practices are explored. Recommendations are made for therapists to focus on broader health issues when client attitudes and practices challenge movement toward an overall healthier lifestyle. Techniques are described for therapists to encourage such changes in each client.

The most important thing you can do to support your professional and personal wellbeing is to cultivate personal awareness and to understand what support you need. This chapter introduces methods and approaches you can use to help maintain a happy balance between a busy and fulfilling professional life and personal health and wellbeing.

This chapter develops in detail a conception of temperance, based on a critical engagement with the dialogue’s resources, which I dub temperance as self-realisation. I explore how this conception is modelled in the dialogue, with particular reference to Socrates’ own procedure as depicted therein. The model enables us to address questions of Socrates’ own relation to temperance, and of how temperance can be regarded as of benefit on this conception. Emphasis is placed on the exercise of temperance as a continuous process and to that extent on self-realisation as something that is necessarily imperfectible. However, it is argued that this makes sense both of the status of temperance as a branch of practical knowledge and of its ability to characterise a whole life.

Black women suffer from higher mortality rates and experience heart disease, breast cancer, and other health issues at different levels than White women. Additionally, Black women commonly experience somatic symptoms related to mental health issues, and therapists can help women understand and address the connection between their physical and psychological health and wellness. In this chapter, we offer suggestions and tools to help therapists raise women’s health literacy, their awareness about mind–emotion–body connections, and provide strategies Black women can use for stress management to improve physical and mental wellness.

This chapter provides an overview of the methodological challenges in researching social inclusion amongst people with mental health conditions and gives examples of interventions that have been shown to be effective in addressing social exclusion including pre-school parenting programmes, early intervention, peer support, recovery colleges, self-care, self-management, and self-directed care. As with all clinical practice, the starting point is the establishment of a therapeutic relationship that encompasses empathy, understanding, hope, and a willingness to help, along with a recovery orientation encompassing collaborative and strengths-based approaches. Much of this does not require a major reorganisation of services, but rather a refocusing and reprioritisation of existing tools and clinical skills, alongside commitment by mental health organisations to ensure their structures facilitate service-user involvement in the planning and delivery of services

Chapter 7 outlines the importance of looking after yourself, particularly as a parent or caregiver of a child or young person. We discuss that without adequate self-care it’s not possible to care for others and go on to discuss some strategies to prioritise your own self-care.

This chapter is focused on self-care for health care practitioners. It begins by building the case of why self-care is important and needed as the experience if cancer, illness and death can be very difficult and overwhelming for participants. It suggests the need for policy and reforms at organisational level to encourage and support self-care and well-being of healthcare practitioners. It suggests different options for practitioners to find out what works for them including support from colleagues, interdisciplinary teams and developing self-care plans.

The data strongly support the position that social support is a powerful source of stress reduction and, thus, a valuable tool for managing burnout. Indeed, much of the stress-management literature suggests that social support is the single most powerful of the whole array of stress-reduction strategies available to and recommended for individuals. Such comfort and support may center on emotional (expressing empathy), instrumental (giving tangible assistance), informational (giving advice), or reappraisal (reframing, suggesting different ways of looking at the stressors) help. Most commonly, social support will comprise a combination of those four types. A critical factor in the effectiveness of social support is the level of trust between the receiver and giver of such support. As widely accepted as the critical role of social support is, healthcare workers generally underutilize their support systems, formal or informal, for a variety of reasons. The ongoing pandemic has made this powerful stress-reduction/burnout-reduction strategy all the more critical.

Caregiver burden is multidimensional, adversely affecting the caregiver’s emotional, social, financial, physical, and spiritual functioning. Demographic risk factors for caregiver burden include female gender, low education, low socioeconomic status, and living with the care recipient. Psychosocial risk factors include caregiver depression and/or anxiety, lack of coping skills, and increased social isolation and decreased social activity for the caregiver. Caregiver burnout is a confluence of emotional exhaustion, detachment, or disengagement as a result of exhaustion without relief and the cynicism that can occur in a caregiver. Caregivers should be encouraged to make time for themselves. A peer group or PWS community can provide a safe outlet to discuss frustrations and emotional difficulties. Practicing mindfulness can reduce distress and increase resilience. When emotionally overwhelmed, caregivers can seek out a mental healthcare provider to help develop effective coping strategies. Healthcare providers can help reduce the risk of caregiver burden and burnout by assessing caregivers’ levels of stress and providing easier access to services.

This chapter discusses the required knowledge, skills, and confidence to provide a safe and compassionate environment by adopting trauma-informed care (TIC). Many people will have experienced traumatic experiences outside of the safety of their family unit, e.g., bullying, or sexual harassment. Therefore, we need to be cautious about blaming parents or care givers, without first establishing the situation and context of the traumatic history of the person.Many people who present to mental health, addiction and disability services, however, will report complex histories of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse (see chapter 15). Evolving research recommends therapeutically addressing complex, as distinct from single incident, trauma (Kezelman & Stavropoulos, 2019), requiring a particular skill set of the practitioner to provide effective therapy. This chapter focuses on the fundamental skills of responding to people who disclose their trauma, particularly sexual abuse, and how practitioners can respond in ways that foster human connectedness.