Introduction

This is one version of the Greek creation myth. It considers that we started with ‘nothing’ and evolved fairly rapidly towards the environment which we experience today. In fact, this is a feature of nearly all creation myths - the Sun, the Earth, its inhabitants, and by inference, the planetary system around us, all formed soon after a divine event had acted to add purpose to the pre-existing nothingness, or chaos.

The details of the traditional scientific view are somewhat different. The Universe was created about 14 Ga ago, in the Big Bang (the exact age is unclear although somewhere between 13.7 and 13.9 Ga is the current consensus). Clumps of material then formed into galaxies, and galaxies spawned stars. From that time until the present day, the cycle of stellar birth and death has continued remorselessly. Our own Solar System formed around 4.56 Ga ago from materials that had been cycled in and out of stars several times (see Box 8.1).

There have been many different theories of how our Solar System formed. These can be split into theories suggesting that the processes that formed the Sun and the planets took place simultaneously in a single integrated event, versus theories suggesting that the planetary system was added to a pre-existing Sun, some time after the Sun's formation. These two approaches are referred to as monistic (single event) and dualistic (two separate events). An example of a dualistic theory of Solar System formation, would be the theory that another star passed close to the Sun, causing matter to be pulled from the Sun into a single filament, which then broke up along its length to form individual planets.

Introduction

Bereavement is not a pathological process, but can lead to a significant mortality and morbidity. Some children may suffer significant psychological consequences (Pettle-Michael & Lansdown, 1986) but depression is rare (Pfeffer et al, 2000). The evidence for the efficacy or usefulness of therapeutic work is limited (Harrington & Harrison, 1999; Currier et al, 2007). Research suggests that positive outcomes from therapeutic work are more likely to be achieved if certain groups of children are selected and provided ‘timely’ treatment (Currier et al, 2007). The corollary of this is that many children do well with family and community support and never need to see child mental health services (Dyregov, 2008).

Indications for bereavement work

Children may need support at times of family bereavement. There are a number of reasons the impact of bereavement on the development of children might be more pronounced.

Managing bereavement

Childhood bereavement services look at the effects of bereavement on children in a number of ways.

Introduction

The routine problems presenting to a CAMHS are likely to be addressed by those working at Tier 2 by an individual specialist mental health professional working with the problem. The demands of this everyday CAMHS work require all the specialist skills available in the service. No professional, unless at a very inexperienced stage, should not be available for Tier 2 work. To some extent the expenditure of energy on the development of the more high-profile ‘specialist’ Tier 3 teams is secondary and needs to be carefully managed to maintain availability of Tier 2 specialist provision. Treatments such as CBT are often offered by Tier 3 teams, although service members with relevant skills will do this as part of their Tier 2 work. The system needs to be coordinated and managed so that there is equity of access for required services at the most effective tier.

Requisites of Tier 2

‘Critical mass’ of staff

Meeting the needs of the community and providing a comprehensive range of services requires a critical mass of CAMHS staff with a multidisciplinary skill mix and a clear recognition of professional function.

Assessment

Assessment represents the first stage of any therapeutic relationship and professionals working at Tier 2 need a clear model of assessment.

Continuum of care

The Tier 2 professional, who may link up with Tier 1 workers, will also be in a position to access and make use of Tier 3 and Tier 4 provision where required. This highlights the importance of communication both within CAMHS and with other agencies, as well as underpinning the principle that all disciplines should be involved in this area of service provision.

Training and supervision

Staff of all disciplines require access to affordable and relevant training. Training budgets are limited and unequal in their distribution. It may be that units develop alternative funding strategies to support less well-resourced disciplines. In-house training initiatives and multi-agency and multidisciplinary training programmes are effective and keep costs down. Professional supervision is a prerequisite for effective professional functioning.

Josef stalin's claim that ‘one death is a tragedy, a million deaths … a statistic’ we might take as an aesthetic and moral gloss on another well-known comment, this one attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘A man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men.’ Stalin's statement makes two assumptions that this essay will question. It assumes that moral feeling – the sort formalised in tragedy – operates on the level of the individual, the one, and is not susceptible to multiplication (or, for that matter, division). It assumes additionally that statistics, the signs for large aggregates of human beings, do not occasion moral feeling. Apparently we do not feel the deaths of a million men with anything like the force we feel for the death of one, ‘a man’, as Napoleon says, ‘like me’.

Stalin contributes to an ongoing debate in moral philosophy, set here in the context of modern mass warfare, a context embracing the Napoleonic era as well as our own. The terms of the debate and its governing assumptions were laid out helpfully, if bluntly, by C. S. Lewis in 1957. Writing in the gloom of the Cold War and against a utilitarian outlook, Lewis argued that none of us can possibly experience suffering on a scale other than that of the single person.

The concept of redundancy employed in this essay is the one used in mathematics and linguistics to designate symbols that do not add information to a sequence. One of the hazards of teaching twentieth-century war literature is the tacit inference of redundancy by readers, namely that the representational conventions as well as the facts and values represented are ‘predictable from … context’. The claim that twentieth-century war writing is made superfluous by War and Peace (1869) is polemical, but it is also intended to do serious work: to draw attention to representations of war which are not predictable from context, and to renew questions such as why representing war as irrational, murderous activity is unefficacious, and why we would imagine otherwise.

The designs of War and Peace as war writing can be recognised as early as 1853, when Tolstoy published a story drawing on his own military experience in the Caucasus:

The fields were not sown or ploughed. There were no cattle or fowl in the fields. No cock crowed in the depth of night to tell the hours. No hen called to her chicks. It was of no use for the kite to lie in wait for chickens in March of this year nor for children to hunt for eggs in secret hiding places. No lambs or calves bleated after their mothers in this region. The wolf might seek its prey elsewhere and here fill his capacious gullet with green grass instead of rams. Larks soared safely through the air and lifted their unending songs with no thought of the whistling attacks of eyas or falcon. No wayfarers went along the roads, carrying their best cheese and dairy produce to market. Throughout the parishes and villages, alas! went forth no mendicants to hear confessions and to preach in Lent but rather robbers and thieves to carry off openly whatever they could find. Houses and churches no longer presented a smiling appearance with newly repaired roofs but rather the lamentable spectacle of scattered, smoking ruins to which they had been reduced by devouring flames. The eye of man was no longer rejoiced by the accustomed sight of green pastures and fields, charmingly colored by the growing grain, but rather saddened by the looks of the nettles and thistles springing up on every side.