Editorial

This editorial is written a week after a UK election that followed the trend in Western political life towards populism and away from a collective approach to society – across and within nation states. In an effort to prepare to write, following these events, I looked back through the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, over the years, to see how other such major political events were reflected in JCP articles, papers and reviews, and in the editorials. What comes through clearly is that the work that clinicians are and have been doing, both within the United Kingdom and internationally, reflects constantly, but only indirectly, the social, political and cultural realities of the environments in which our work has taken place: the settings, the presenting issues, the models of treatment and the training. With a very few exceptions, the Journal has on the whole not included an explicit comment on the socio-political climate in which we and our patients live, feel and work.

Now, with an increased focus within the child psychotherapy community on diversity and equalities, we are more explicitly learning how to work with wider systemic influences, and how to think about our role within them. That knowledge and the understanding of what it means in the consulting room, in the team and in the teaching environment, are likely to become more important and of greater value to our patients and students, at a time when wider social inequalities may become more stark.

As part of the ACP’s aim to develop our thinking in relation to diversity, this edition was originally designed as a ‘special issue’, with a focus on aspects of difference and sameness and how they are worked with by child and adolescent psychotherapists. When relatively few articles came in following the call for papers, there was an opportunity to think about what this meant. In the process, we questioned our own decision to put this crucial aspect of practice into a ‘special issue’, with the risk that ‘diversity’ wou