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Walk And Talk Counselling

by Fez McLeod

363 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #07-1429; ISBN 1-4251-3645-1; US$54.00, C$54.00, EUR36.61, £24.27

Walk and Talk Counselling is a holistic intervention that uses the outdoors to help heal a person's biological, social, and/or mental dysfunction. This thesis explores the published research in detail.

About the Book

Counselling people outdoors is not a new concept. It's an ancient-forgotten method that we need to go back to. This is one of the most multi-cultural friendly intervention strategies offered to the consumer of health services because so many cultures around the world value being outdoors when trying to heal from a physical or emotional injury. Yet working outdoors with people is continually ignored by psychiatry as well as by those therapists who embrace the outdated psycho-social intervention model. It gives them all an excuse to stay indoors, which is no longer acceptable - especially by men.

Aboriginals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Africa, Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, Brazil, South America, the Amazon...the list goes on and on - they all prefer being out in nature when they want to work through issues and think things out for themselves. They don't want help from inside an office space. Yet First Nations would like to see more appropriate services designed for them. I'd also like to ask you to think about men and the types of services currently offered to them under the umbrella of mental health. Most men avoid accessing mental health services because of the negative stigma that is so often attached to psychiatric care and its intervention methods.

We men need other options that do not fall under psychiatric intervention policy and the medical model that they use. Walk and talk counselling therefore, is one of the key ways to attract men into accessing mental health services while avoiding the negative stigma so often associated with psychiatric care. Within the context of mental health, it's time therapists and nurses started demonstrating to the public the differences between the medical and holistic models of care so that the consumer can select the model they wish to be helped by with the least risk of complications. This form of holistic healthcare embraces the treatment model of the bio-psycho-social intervention strategy - psychology's newest form of treatment. It makes both the therapist and the client get outdoors to work the body and the mind while engaging in positive social contact.

Here is a service - performed for thousands of years by aboriginal healer's and warriors that can help a man or a woman heal from their biological, social, and mental health injuries in a way that does not cause this negative stigma to occur. What's more, if we want to attract more men into our healthcare professions in order to correct the problem of gender imbalance within the health sector, then it's time that we provided these men with work environments where they felt comfortable and safe - as opposed to female dominated wards, where men rarely stay for any great length of time. This is also one of the much-needed solutions to help counter nursing shortages within acute, community and outreach care as well as one of the best ways to tackle the pandemic problems caused by obesity and depression.

About the Author

Fez McLeod is a public health nurse and mental health counsellor. Residing in Canada, he continues to encourage holistic intervention strategies within the context of biological, social, and mental health care.