Editorial 

Welcome to the summer edition of Inside Out for 2023. As ever we have a wide variety of articles in this issue and we hope you will find them interesting and thought provoking and perhaps an inspiration and support for your work.

In an ever changing and seemingly crisis filled world, we are called to be adaptive and courageous in response to the challenges we face. We are not long after the turmoil of a global pandemic, the spectre of the effects of climate change seem more and more present to us, and now there are people raising the alarm for the potential harms of AI as it gets ever more sophisticated. And they are just the chart toppers!

In various ways the articles in this issue talk to this theme. We have articles that speak to the issue of ageing and eldering by Martina Breen and Dr Declan Lyons, pertinent now as our populations ages; an article on doing therapy in nature by Maeve Peoples, a response to pressures from the Covid-19 pandemic; and a book review on working with sex workers which may challenge internally held prejudices. There is also an article by Prof Windy Dryden on naming (and legitimising) therapy that may last for only one session.

We also have articles on dreams, creative supervision, the place of spirituality in therapy, all providing metaphorical food for the journey.

Therapy, of course, encourages us and our clients to take space to reflect and explore important and fundamental issues. Matthew Henson grapples with the fundamental question of how therapy works, never an easy one to answer. While Mary Spring, playfully explores how things sometimes work against us on the way to therapy!

And what about a possible addition to the DSM? Read the article by Seán Ó Tarpaigh to find out more. It is a thought provoking, tongue-in-cheek piece that will make you reflect, not only about the merits of the DSM, but also about the effects of greed on all of us.

And that is not all, throughout the issue there are poems, book reviews, an account of being an IAHIP volunteer, a flash fiction about anxiety and dissociation, and news of a memorial library in memory of Mary Paula Walsh.

We want to make the journal relevant, topical and interesting, so if you have a topic that you feel needs to written about and given attention, please consider submitting an article to us for future editions.

Finally, the editorial board would like to thank Jamie O’Crowley for his contribution to the board. Jamie is moving on due to other commitments after nearly 3 years with the board and he has been a valued member whom we will be sorry to lose. We wish him all the best.

IAHIP 2023 - INSIDE OUT 100 - Summer 2023