Health & Fitness

The purpose of the present book, An Intersectional Approach to Counseling Children and Adolescents with Health Conditions, is to provide mental health professionals and students of counseling, medicine, psychology, social work, and other helping professions, with useful information and helpful suggestions for their work with children and adolescents who experience significant health issues. The chapter authors rely on an intersectional understanding of the human experience and specifically focus on how diverse youth experience, understand, and seek support for specific health conditions and illnesses.

Considering contemporary research that has shed light on some of the ways individuals’ multiple social identities interconnect and interact to compound experiences of illness, health psychology researchers would benefit from applying an intersectional lens in their explorations of the micro and macro-level variables that influence pathways towards health and illness for different groups. For mental health practitioners, an intersectional perspective on diverse children and adolescents’ experiences of specific health conditions will more likely lead to innovative and inclusive interventions that target change at multiple levels.

We are confident that our book will be of great use to mental health practitioners and students who plan to or are currently working with children and adolescents with significant health issues. Readers of the book can focus on a specific health condition that is common among children/adolescents and develop their knowledge, skills, and awareness of the cultural and systemic considerations in working with children/adolescents and their families. Particular attention can be paid to the ways in which the clients’ and the counselors’ intersectional social identities may influence counseling children and adolescents with significant health issues.

Photographer Richard Pilnick has created an unprecedented study of the asanas in the first four series by working with four of the leading teachers from the global community, all of whom studied under the guidance of the father of Ashtanga yoga, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (Guruji). 

The photographs are given the space to speak for themselves, each accompanied merely by its name in English and Sanskrit. The book proceeds from the Sun Salutation and Fundamental Postures, through the Primary and Intermediate series, to two Advanced series and a Finishing sequence. The backgrounds used for the portraits progress from dark to light, reflecting the progression of the inner self from darkness to light through the journey of the Ashtanga yoga movement meditation. Each chapter is introduced by an accompanying poem and a portrait of the internationally respected teacher demonstrating the postures and the fluid movements and breaths that connect them.