Food and Mental Health
A Guide for Health Professionals

Written by an experienced psychotherapist, this book provides professionals in the fields of health and wellbeing with a guide to human relationships with food, and their impact on mental health. Acknowledging how food choices profoundly effect a person?s experience in the world, Gerrie Hughes offers knowledge and support around how to understand and negotiate the relationship between food and mind. Chapters offers facts, information and theories on key topics such as self-image, ?good? nutrition, sustainability and rituals. Each chapter uses vignettes, case studies and reflective activities to stimulate thought about the reader?s own assumptions and experience and offer approaches to how they might use their expertise with the people with whom they work. Providing an accessible and easy to read guide into the role food plays in our lives, this book will be of interest to a range of healthcare practitioners, including mental health nurses, occupational therapists, psychotherapists, and counsellors.

Introduction. 1.Appetiser: A Taste of What is Coming Next. 2.What Makes ‘Good’ Nutrition: Food Groups and Traditional Cuisines. 3.Roots: Factors Underlying Relationships with Food. 4.Wholeness, Balance and Regulation: Needs and Gestalt. 5.A World of Food: History and Current Situation. 6.Difference and Diversity. 7.Vital and Virtual: Personal and Digital Relationships. 8.Rituals and Feasts: Food, Art and Spirituality. 9.Digestif: Satisfaction and Integration.

Gerrie Hughes is a UKCP Registered Gestalt psychotherapist and supervisor, working in private practice since 1992. She has wide experience working in the NHS, education and business as a therapist, supervisor and facilitator.

With illustrations by Liz Hammond

Liz Hammond trained as an existential psychoanalytic psychotherapist, working within and outside the NHS, and taught at Surrey University. She began taking lessons at the emilyball@seawhites contemporary art school about 20 years ago, has her own studio and has exhibited locally in Sussex, in London and in Wales.