Editorial

Abstract

This issue is a collection of articles that examines effective supervision and provides reflective models based on case work with additional empirical research studies and a book review. In this edition of the Asia Pacific Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy, practitioners from Hong Kong, India, Israel, Canada and the United States give voice to their ideas and experiences of counselling and psychotherapy from differing perspectives. Regardless of the level of experience of counsellors and psychotherapists, supervision is required to enable them to reflect on their practice as well as to encourage critical self-care to sustain themselves and work effectively with their clients. Karin Jordan proposes a trauma-informed counselling supervision, especially involving traumaaffected clients. This supervision model can be considered to assist clinical supervisors to support counsellors who are working with trauma-affected clients. Self-reflection is a core ability and an attribute that human service professionals find essential. Smadar Ben-Asher and Nitza Roskin develop a structured reflective tool which originates from psychotherapy and operates on the basis of self-narrative. With an emphasis on reflective examination of the event, critical observation, re-conceptualisation, and new action, the tool, as discussed in their paper, can help educational counselling students gain a reflective understanding of their own personal and professional development during the educational or training process. A qualitative approach is employed to analyse narratives of the interviewees and demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool in Ben-Asher and Roskin’s paper. Assessment of needs of clients serves to help counsellors and psychotherapists better understand the situation of their clients. In their article, Palanisamy Amirthalingam, Rajendran Natham and Gnaesvaran Arunachalam examine the usefulness of Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA). They compare the MOCA and the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) as means to attend to the cognitive status of epilepsy population receiving phenytoin monotherapy. This study suggests that the sensitivity of the MOCA as an assessment tool can help counsellors to identify the clients who have mild cognitive impairment and provide hints for appropriate counselling service. An additional assessment related study in this issue addresses the development of a Japanese version of the Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (SUIS-J). Yasuko Tanaka, Naoki Yoshinaga, Aki Tsuchiyagaito, Chihiro Sutoh, Daisuke Matsuzawa, Yoshiyuki Hirano, Michiko Nakazato and Eiji Shimizu conducted two studies. In study 1, they translated and validated a Japanese version of Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale (SUIS-J). In study 2, this scale was rated by people with social anxiety disorders before and after the CBT. Their study examined the relationship between mental imagery and social anxiety symptoms. ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 2018, VOL. 9, NO. 2, 125–126 https://doi.org/10.1080/21507686.2018.1493372