Psychology in the Real World: Community- based groupwork

This is a welcome book indeed. It is very easy to read and I can see it sitting well in community teams (hopefully well thumbed). It's very accessible and provides many useful tips, without in anyway sounding like you are being told what to do … This book offers 'another way' of looking at groupwork and community working … The implicit message is to try things and go beyond the constraints of evidence based strategies … To be with people where they live; in their real worlds. I would recommend this book; you won't regret it! Dr Nigel P Short, therapist, educator, former mental health nurse, 2011.

I really enjoyed this book and like the concept of ‘psychology in the real world’. The projects described in the book reveal how people can develop and recover through sharing an interest and developing knowledge or a skill rather than through abstract internal self-examination. To me this is their great strength and the book reveals how community-based groupwork can better equip people for life than conventional therapies. Joanna Moncrieff, consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at University College London

So much more than just another groupwork 'cookbook', this volume will be invaluable to mental health service users, health and social care professionals and local people who are interested in putting community psychology ideas into practice, and to anyone who has ever asked themselves about the causes of unhappiness in our society. Paul Moloney, Counselling Psychologist, The Psychologist, February 2011.

Without being unrealistic about the benefits, Holmes points to the invaluable potential that groups have in helping people appreciate their own unique qualities and their shared humanity… The book is a collection of course contents, flyers, testimonies and discussions put together as a detailed and varied resource. This comes interspersed with chapters about groups processes and theories, all in an unaffected and accessible style … This embodies a way of thinking and relating that challenges dominant ideas of mental health and that looks squarely at issues of power and difference … challenges the contemporary fixation upon short-term individual ‘interventions’, the medicalisation of distress and the diminishment of the NHS into a business venture. Chris Rose, Group Psychotherapist, Therapy Today, June 2010

What Guy writes is very carefully thought through, is backed by extensive clinical experience, and has an honesty and integrity … What strikes me above all is that the book is intensely and profoundly personal, by this I don’t mean that it is unduly individualistic or self-indulgent … what comes across above all is your tolerance of and respect for a whole range of approaches in clinical psychology. In other hands, this could appear to be ‘spongily’ eclectic, but in fact it speaks to a readiness to listen to others and extract from their work what seems valuable and knit it intelligently into your own approach. … People will be encouraged to try things, and to step beyond the constraints of so-called ‘evidence-based practice’. Maybe they will be encouraged to be themselves, which would be a very positive outcome! David Smail, Clinical Pyschologist

I found it very moving and thought provoking. I really liked the descriptions of what the groups were like and the ‘What is the point of being alive?’ chapter made me cry. … In your account of the terrible Black Dog session I felt I was ‘there’ and that things had not been tidied up to make them more effective or cleaner than they were. It was a relief to read something so honest … I think the book is terrific, clear and brave. Penny Woolcock, film director