Welcome to the first issue of 2017, which happens to mark 10 years of my editorship. I hope you found the special edition last year on developmental disabilities interesting and helpful. This issue is a mixture of topics, again starting with mental health in different populations, then articles looking at counselling in schools and finishing off with three articles on bullying.
The first article, by Robyn Le Brocque, Alexandra De Young, Gillian Montague, Steven Pocock, Sonja March, Nikki Triggell, Claire Rabaa, and Justin Kenardy, looks at the mental health of children who have been exposed to traumatic events and reviews the mental health trauma resources available for use in educational settings, especially post-disaster resources. The paper argues for increasing teacher awareness of post-trauma reactions in children and explores strategies teacher can use in the classroom. The next article in this section on mental health is by Ngai Kwan Ho, Robert Schweitzer, and Nigar Khawaja, who examined the role of social support, school belonging, and acculturative stress on the academic achievement of recently arrived Chinese high school students. Interestingly, they found that while perceived social support and acculturative stress were not associated with academic achievement, a sense of school belonging was actually negatively associated with academic achievement.
In the next section, there are three articles on school counselling. The first, by Terry Hanley, Zehra Ersahin, Aaron Sefi, and Judith Hebron, compared online counselling and face-to-face student counselling, and found that students use online and face-to-face counselling in different ways. In the next article, Mantak Yuen, Queenie Lee, Jason Kam, and Patrick Lau look at an aspect of positive psychology that is gaining much traction in school at present. The purpose-in-life concept is examined in informing school guidance and counselling interventions for adolescents, with the PATHS program in Hong Kong used as an example. The third article, by Kai Shen Chen and Jin Kuan Kok, examines the reasons why students in Malaysia do not use school counselling services.
The last three articles are on the topic of bullying, which unfortunately is still a perennial problem. Rachel Muller, Jason Skues, and Lisa Wise looked at how primary school students in Australia cope with cyberbullying. Almost half the participants reported being repeatedly cyberbullied. Students who had been cyberbullied mainly used technological responses to stop the cyberbullying. In the next article, Eleni Didaskalou, Grace Skrsypiec, Eleni Andreou, and Phillip Slee looked at coping in Australian middle school students who were victimised. The unfortunate finding was that these students did not identify school counsellors as a source of support. In the last article, Xiaoqun Liu, Gui Chen, Peng Hu, Guipin Guo, and Shuiyuan Xiao examined bullying at school and found that victimisation was positively correlated with suicidal ideation but that perceived social support buffered, as well as partially mediated, that relationship.
Unfortunately, there is no practitioner section in this issue. This is because we did not receive any papers. This is very disappointing, as I am sure that these papers are probably the most useful to you. However, practitioners seem very reluctant to write what works, or conversely, what does not work for them. We are at a loss about how to encourage practitioners to write for this section. Even tapping people on the shoulder has been having limited results. I know you are all busy, but it would be great if you could put ‘pen to paper’, or should I say ‘fingers to keyboard’, and write something about your practice.
