Andrew Parkin

This handbook provides a succinct introduction to child mental health, covering the nature, prevalence, treatment and management of mental health problems in children and young people. The authors explore a range of issues surrounding the emotional needs of young people, showing how specific problems such as ADHD and learning difficulties can be targeted, while also recognising diversity issues and paying particular attention to at-risk groups. This edition is updated to reflect current direction in services, cutting edge approaches to interventions in primary health care, teaching and social service settings, as well as incorporating children's views on what mental health means to them and the impact of social media. Setting out ways in which young people can be supported by all practitioners in primary care, and covering early years through to late adolescence, the authors have created an invaluable resource for any front-line practitioner working in this area.

This book is a follow-up to the author’s previous Peter Lang book, The Rendez-Vous: Poems of Multicultural Experience (2003). The new book contains recent poetry and prose by Andrew Parkin, together with the prefaces to two new longer poems. The Gourds is based on a collection of small Chinese gourds etched to depict scenes from literature and legend. Star of a Hundred Years is a dramatic ode dedicated to the father of Hong Kong cinema, Sir Run Run Shaw, who is more than one hundred years old and whose lifetime coincides with the history of film. The ode is thus cast in the form of a film scenario; this creates a scenariode, a new sub-genre of verse. There are also lyrics and prose poems as well as fiction, all involving cross-cultural experience found in a variety of places in different countries. A sequence of «flashes» reveals the past as not only another country but also another culture, contrasting with our contemporary lives in certain ways. The mixture of genres and the way they contrast with one another reflect at times the post-modern moment in literature. And again, in the continuum and fragmented flashes of memory, it becomes evident that many of us now live as international and trans-cultural people.

This book contains an introduction centred on migration, exile, the other, and the experience of multicultural communities in the modern world, followed by three sections of original poetry. In Part I, poems deal with Britain, Canada, and China (mainly Hong Kong). In Part II the focus shifts to Australia and then Europe again (mainly France). Part III, entitled Shards presents fragmentary lyric voices suggesting the processes of cultural fragmentation and change. In each part the poems connect with individual experience, historical events such as the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, myth and art. Multicultural experience as a modern reality, loss, regeneration and creativity are all major concerns in the poems. Their many artistic references include, among others, Apollinaire, Bonnefoy, Michael Bullock, Rosalia de Castro, Dante, Robert Desnos, Anne Frank, Li Po, Magritte, Albert Namajira, Sidney Nolan, Bill Reid, Laura Wee Lay Laq and Zhang Ji. From the experience of living in modern multicultural societies, the writer envisages the kind of international modernity that tries to preserve the dignity of individuals and humane values. Such modernity has emerged from cultures fragmented by revolutions, globalization, and rapid change. These poems occupy both hemispheres, inhabit temperate and tropical zones, and make cultural transfers across them.