Welcome (or welcome back!) to Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology. We are so pleased to bring you the first issue in Volume Five – our 20th issue, funded by you our readers through our Kickstarter campaign!
Our main feature article in this issue is a topic dear to Kate’s heart – how social gaming has implications for the world of therapy and why we should be worried about it. We spend a lot of our business days immersed in how technology can help us and our clients function better and work towards improved mental health, and our features show you these innovations in issue after issue – but what do we need to know about the “fun” side of our client’s lives? Are their leisure pursuits something that gives them joy in life, or are there more sinister machinations at work? Kate teamed up with Professor Mark Griffiths to unpick the seemingly innocent world of gaming on social media, to discuss how online social gaming has implications for our clients by tapping into a behavioural reward system that often leads to addictive behaviour, the closest cousin being harmful gambling.
We also welcome Catherine Knibbs, a UK specialist in CyberHarm and Young People. She examines the links between adolescent development and the peer pressure young people experience in cyberspace, often leading to negative behaviour or, in turn, negative results. Cath also highlights the importance of what we can do as adults – moving away from shielding young people from the darker side of the Internet and towards ensuring their resilience in facing them. By understanding the motivation behind online interaction, our young people of the future will find a happier way of living with the outcomes.
Finally, Mark Shields – the CAM Coach – talks us through how his business embraces many different technologies to make a success of it, and gives us his insight into some of the tools needed in running a thriving clinic online. Mark’s book is featured in our Love of Books section, so make sure you check that out as well!
As always, our regular columnists are here, and we say a very fond farewell to Anne Stokes for her final CyberSupervision column. Anne has been with TILT since Issue One, and it is hard to lose such a stalwart member of the team! Our best wishes go to her as she frees up her time to work on other projects, and her insights into Online Supervision will be sorely missed. Her shoes will be filled by Cedric Speyer in the future, who has a challenging role to take on!
Best wishes to all our readers for the holiday period and happy reading!
Kate and DeeAnna
PDF Download: TILT Magazine~ Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology, Fall 2014
