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What is International Volunteer Day?

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Introduction

The International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development (05 December), more commonly referred to as International Volunteer Day (IVD), is an international observance mandated by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1985. It offers an opportunity for volunteer-involving organisations and individual volunteers to promote volunteerism, encourage governments to support volunteer efforts and recognise volunteer contributions to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at local, national and international levels.

International Volunteer Day is celebrated by many non-governmental organisations, civil society, and the private sector, among others. It is also marked and supported by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme.

UNV coordinates a campaign to promote IVD every year, building on the impact volunteers have in communities, nationally and globally for peace and development.

In 2018 the focus of IVD is not only to celebrate volunteerism in all its facets, but also to highlight the role that volunteers play in building resilient communities. It is worth noting that current estimates equate the global volunteer workforce to 109 million full-time workers. 30% of volunteering that takes place formally through organisations, associations and groups; and 70% occurs through informal engagement between individuals. Overall, 60% of the informal volunteers are women.

Background

IVD is a chance for individual volunteers, communities and organisations to promote their contributions to development at the local, national and international levels. By combining UN support with a grassroots mandate, IVD is a unique opportunity for people and volunteer-involving organisations to work with government agencies, non-profit institutions, community groups, academia and the private sector.

The International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development was adopted by the UN General Assembly through Resolution A/RES/40/212 on 17 December 1985.

In 2012, in response to evolving experiences and recommendations, the UNV programme spearheaded a Five-Year IVD Strategy, with the aim to make it more globally recognised and grassroots-owned.

Celebration of IVD and the Themes

In the last six years, IVD was celebrated each year in over 80 countries annually. The IVD website receives around 50,000 page views every year, with around 150 stories posted which highlight over 50,000 volunteers, photos and videos of celebrations worldwide.

  • IVD 2018 – “Volunteers build Resilient Communities”:
    • IVD 2018 celebrates volunteer efforts that strengthen local ownership and the resilience of the community in the face of natural disasters, economic stresses and political shocks.
    • The event on 05 December 2018 will focus on how volunteers can build resilient communities.
  • IVD 2017 – “Volunteers Act First. Here. Everywhere.”:
    • The focus of IVD 2017 was to recognize the positive solidarity of volunteers around the world who answer calls in times of crisis, helping save lives today and supporting those who want to continue living their lives with dignity tomorrow.
  • IVD 2016 – “Global Applause – give volunteers a hand”:
    • Under this theme, IVD presented a round of global applause to celebrate volunteers everywhere and encouraged others to join in and contribute to peace and sustainable development.
  • IVD 2015 – “Your world is changing. Are you? Volunteer!”:
    • The goal of IVD 2015 was to start a dialogue about how volunteerism is vital to the success of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda.
  • IVD 2014 – “Make change happen, volunteer!”:
    • The goal of IVD 2014 was to highlight the contribution of volunteers in engaging people from the grassroots in decision-making processes, ultimately creating spaces for participation that lead to stronger governance, social cohesion, peace and sustainable development.
  • IVD 2013 – “Young. Global. Active.”:
    • The goal of the event was to pay special tribute to the contribution of youth volunteers to global peace and sustainable human development, highlighting that young people act as agents of change in their communities.
  • IVD 2012 – “Celebrate volunteering”:
    • The event celebrated its commitment and hope for a better world. The main focus of IVD 2012 was awareness of and recognition for volunteers and volunteer organisations.

A Focus on Partnership and Development

Through the years, IVD has been used strategically: many countries have focused on volunteers’ contributions to achieving the SDGs, a set of time-bound targets to combat poverty, hunger, disease, health, environmental degradation and gender equality.

IVD celebrates active volunteers and attracts new volunteers in the North and in the South, with a special focus on promoting South-South cooperation.

The organisation of IVD is generally the result of a partnership between the UN system, governments, volunteer-involving organisations and committed individuals. Representatives from the media or academia, foundations, the private sector, faith groups, and sports and recreational organisations are often involved too.

The General Assembly invited Governments to observe annually, on 05 December, the International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development (resolution 40/212 of 17 December 1985) and urged them to take measures to heighten awareness of the important contribution of volunteer service, thereby stimulating more people in all walks of life to offer their services as volunteers, both at home and abroad.

The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 52/17 of 20 November 1997, proclaimed 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers (IYV). The year was conceived to further the recognition of volunteers, facilitate their work, create a communication network and promote the benefits of voluntary service.

In 2001, the International Year of Volunteers, the General Assembly adopted a set of recommendations on ways in which Governments and the United Nations system could support volunteering and asked that they be given wide dissemination (resolution 56/38 of 05 December 2001).

The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 57/106 of 22 November 2002, called upon the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme to ensure that the potential of International Volunteer Day is fully realized.

On 18 December 2008, the General Assembly decided that on or around 05 December 2011, two plenary meetings of the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly should be devoted to the follow-up to the International Year of Volunteers and the commemoration of its tenth anniversary (resolution 63/153).

Online Volunteering Award

Traditionally, on International Volunteer Day (05 December), UNV calls for nominations and launches the UNV Online Volunteering Award. A jury made up of UNV representatives and external experts in volunteerism and development cooperation reviews the nominations and selects the winners.

The UNV programme invites citizens worldwide to be inspired by the winner’s stories and participate in the global voting for their favourite winner. The team that gets the most votes is announced as the public’s favourite on the International Day of Happiness.

The purpose of the award is to recognise online volunteers’ contributions towards achieving the SDGs, to showcase the many ways in which online volunteers can strengthen the capacities of organisations and to demonstrate the difference volunteers can make to peace and development projects by sharing their time, skills and expertise over the Internet.

On This Day … 05 December

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People (Births)

  • 1901 – Milton H. Erickson, American psychiatrist and author (d. 1980).

Milton H. Erickson

Milton Hyland Erickson (05 December 1901 to 25 March 1980) was an American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy.

He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association.

He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.

On This Day … 04 November

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People (Births)

  • 1882 – Constance Davey, Australian psychologist (d. 1963).
  • 1925 – Albert Bandura, Canadian-American psychologist and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1963 – Constance Davey, Australian psychologist (b. 1882).
  • 1981 – Jeanne Block, American psychologist (b. 1923).

Constance Davey

Constance Muriel Davey OBE (04 December 1882 to 04 December 1963) was an Australian psychologist who worked in the South Australian Department of Education, where she introduced the state’s first special education classes.

Career

Davey was born in 1882 in Nuriootpa, South Australia, to Emily Mary (née Roberts) and Stephen Henry Davey. She began teaching at a Port Adelaide private school in 1908 and at St Peter’s Collegiate Girls’ School in 1909. She attended the University of Adelaide as a part-time student, completing a BA in philosophy in 1915 and an MA in 1918. In 1921 she won a Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship which allowed her to undertake a doctorate at the University of London; her main area of research was “mental efficiency and deficiency” in children. She received her doctorate in 1924 and visited the United States and Canada to observe the teaching of intellectually disabled and delinquent children before returning to Australia.

In November 1924 Davey was hired as the first psychologist in the South Australian Department of Education, where she was tasked with examining and organising classes for “backward, retarded and problem” school students. She examined and performed intelligence tests on all educationally delayed children, and established South Australia’s first “opportunity class” for these children in 1925. She set up a course which educated teachers on working with intellectually disabled children in 1931. She began lecturing in psychology at the University of Adelaide in 1927, continuing until 1950, and in 1938 she helped to set up a new university course for training social workers. She resigned from the Department of Education in 1942, by which point there were 700 children in the opportunity classes she had introduced.

Davey was a member of the Women’s Non-Party Political Association for 30 years and served as the organisation’s president from 1943 to 1947. She became a fellow of the British Psychological Society in 1950 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1955. In 1956 she published Children and Their Law-makers, a historical study of South Australian law as it pertained to children, which she had begun in 1945 as a senior research fellow at the University of Adelaide. Davey died of thyroid cancer on her 81st birthday in 1963.

Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura OC (born 04 December 1925) is a Canadian-American psychologist who is the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University.

Bandura has been responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviourism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory (renamed the social cognitive theory) and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. This Bobo doll experiment demonstrated the concept of observational learning.

A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget, and as the most cited living one. Bandura is widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

Jeanne Block

Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block (17 July 1923 to 04 December 1981) was an American psychologist. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centred personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.

Career

Block was born in 1923 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was raised in a small town in Oregon. After graduating from high school, she entered Oregon State University as a home economics major, but she was dissatisfied with her education. She joined SPARS, the women’s branch of the United States Coast Guard, in 1944. While serving in World War II, Block was badly burned and nearly died. She was treated with skin grafts, and she was able to return to military service until 1946.

After completing a psychology degree at Reed College, she attended graduate school at Stanford University. At Stanford, Block met two mentors, Ernest Hilgard and Maud Merrill James. Hilgard wrote a popular general psychology textbook and co-wrote a textbook on learning theories, and he became president of the American Psychological Association. James had been an associate of intelligence researcher Lewis Terman. Block also met her future husband and research collaborator, Jack Block, during her time at Stanford.

Pregnant at the time she finished her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1951, Block worked mostly part-time in the 1950s while she raised four children. Block and her husband created a person-centred personality theory that became popular among personality researchers. The theory examined personality in terms of two variables, ego-resiliency (the ability to respond flexibly to changing situations) and ego-control (the ability to suppress impulses). In 1963, she was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship and she moved with her family to Norway for a year. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965.

In the 1970s, Block published an analysis the sex-role socialisation occurring in several groups of children in the United States and Northern Europe. Even across countries, boys were typically raised to be independent, high-achieving and unemotional, and girls were generally encouraged to express feelings, to foster close relationships and to pursue typical feminine ideals.

Block was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Hofheimer Prize for outstanding psychiatric research from the American Psychological Association (APA). She was elected president of the APA Division of Developmental Psychology.

Block died on 04 December 1981, having been diagnosed with cancer earlier in the year.

What are the Current Trends in Therapy for Mental Disorders in Adolescence?

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Research Paper Title

Mental disorders in adolescence: current trends in therapy.

Background

On the basis of the high prevalence for behavioural problems and mental disorders in adolescence and its persistence into adulthood it is tested whether and based upon which emphasis this topic is considered in the recent discussion on psychotherapy.

Therefore, a bibliometric analysis is given that summarizes the issue in the 2011 and 2012 volumes of representative German child and adolescent psychological and psychiatric journals.

The focus lies on conduct disorder, depression, deliberate self-harm, dissociative disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder.

Reference

de Vries, U., Lehmkuhl, G. & Petermann, F. (2020) Mental disorders in adolescence: current trends in therapy.

Book: Never Let Go: How to Parent Your Child Through Mental Illness

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Book Title:

Never Let Go: How to Parent Your Child Through Mental Illness.

Author(s): Suzanne Alderson.

Year: 2020.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Vermilion.

Type(s): Paperback, Audiobook, and Kindle.

Synopsis:

How to help your child with mental illness through partnering, not parenting.

Never Let Go is a supportive and practical guide for parents looking after a child with a mental illness. Suzanne Alderson understands the agonising struggle of bringing a child back from the brink of suicide, having spent three years supporting her own daughter through recovery. Her method of ‘partnering, not parenting’ has now helped thousands of other parents through her charity, Parenting Mental Health.

Combining Suzanne’s honest personal experience with expert input from psychologists, this book provides parents with the methods and knowledge they need to support, shield and strengthen their child as they progress towards recovery. Chapters include a background to the mental health epidemic, why a new method of parenting is crucial, how to change your thinking about mental health and practical advice on solutions to daily problems including accepting the new normal, dealing with others, and looking after yourself as well as your child.

Book: Understanding Mental Illness 6th edition: Mental Health Awareness For Self Teaching

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Book Title:

Understanding Mental Illness 6th edition: Mental Health Awareness For Self Teaching.

Author(s): Marianne Richards.

Year: 2015.

Edition: Sixth (6th).

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

Understanding Mental Illness is the 6th edition of this professionally acclaimed book. This is a comprehensive, jargon-free guide aimed at volunteers, patients, carers, new professionals and students of mental health, as well as the keen general reader.

The book contains a wealth of information, including a history of mental illness from primitive times to the 20th century, with the often-bizarre treatments meted out in earlier times.

There is a selection of case histories on common disorders, together with ‘pen portraits’ illustrating ‘a day in the life of’ medical and non-medical therapists. Illustrated throughout with a glossary, suggested reading and index. The keen student is sure to find topics of interest for further study in this fascinating field.

Book: Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing: The craft of caring

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Book Title:

Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing: The Craft of Caring.

Author(s): Mary Chambers.

Year: 2017.

Edition: Third (3rd).

Publisher: Routledge.

Type(s): Hardcover, Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

This new edition of a bestselling, evidence-based textbook provides a comprehensive overview of psychiatric and mental health nursing. Keeping service users and their recovery at the centre of care, the holistic approach will help nurses to gain the tools and understanding required to work in this complex area.

Extensively updated for this new edition, the text looks at:

  • Aspects of mental health nursing: covering topics such as ethics, developing therapeutic relationships and supervision.
  • The foundations of mental health nursing: discussing diagnosis, assessment and risk.
  • Caring for those experiencing mental health distress: looking at wide range of troubles including anxiety, bipolar disorder, eating disorders and issues around sexuality and gender.
  • Care planning and approaches to therapeutic practice: exploring ideas, pathways and treatments such as recovery, CBT, psychodynamic therapies and psychopharmacology.
  • Services and support for those with mental health distress: covering topics such as collaborative work, involvement of service users and their families and carers, and a range of different mental healthcare settings.
  • Mental health nursing in the twenty-first century: highlighting emerging and future trends including the political landscape, physical health and health promotion, and technological advances.

This accessible and comprehensive textbook integrates service user perspectives throughout and includes student-friendly features such as learning outcomes, key points summaries, reflection points and further reading sections. It is an essential resource for all mental health nursing students, as well as an invaluable reference for practising nurses.

Book: Psychopharmacology: A mental health professional’s guide to commonly used medications (Nursing)

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Book Title:

Psychopharmacology: A mental health professional’s guide to commonly used medications (Nursing).

Author(s): Herbert Mwebe.

Year: 2018.

Edition: First (1st).

Publisher: Critical Publishing Ltd.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

This jargon-free guide is suitable for all trainee and registered health professionals who require knowledge and understanding of drugs used in the treatment of mental health conditions for prescribing or administering purposes. A life-saving pocketbook that you can easily carry anywhere you go!

Introductory material provides a background on psychotropic drugs, the aetiology of mental illness, some of the commonly used drugs in practice and brief notes on common non-pharmacological interventional options. It also examines biochemical and neurodevelopmental theories and the link to the pathophysiology of mental illness as well as clinical decision making.

The central chapters of the book provide comprehensive coverage of all the major medications used in mental health. Each focuses on a specific class of drug, detailing the most commonly used medicines, including side effects, average doses, contra-indications and clinical management interventions that may be required. At the end of each chapter a series of review questions enable readers to review their learning, and theory is clearly related to practice throughout.

Book: Life Is a Four-Letter Word

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Book Title:

Life Is a Four-Letter Word: A Mental Health Survival Guide for Professionals.

Author(s): Andy Salkeld.

Year: 2020.

Edition: First (1st), Illustrated Edition.

Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing.

Type(s): Paperback and Kindle.

Synopsis:

  • Do you ever feel you’re a fraud and about to be found out?
  • Do you feel an expectation to keep going and to be strong?
  • Do you ever think what it would be like to just… ‘STOP’?

You are not alone. Mental ill health impacts one in four people every year, and professionals in high-pressure jobs are especially vulnerable.

Life is a Four-Letter Word is a mental health survival guide for professionals, from a high-flying Big 4 accountant who has struggled with depression, anxiety, stress and suicidal thoughts and learned a lot along the way.

Andy now advocates positive action around mental health, working closely with business leaders across the UK to help them build mentally healthy cultures. He is a renowned speaker and writer on mental health, entrepreneurship and finance.

On This Day … 03 December

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People (Births)

  • 1895 – Anna Freud, Austrian-English psychologist and psychoanalyst (d. 1982)
  • 1943 – J. Philippe Rushton, English-Canadian psychologist and academic (d. 2012).

People (Deaths)

  • 2008 – Robert Zajonc, Polish-American psychologist and author (b. 1923).
  • 2014 – Nathaniel Branden, Canadian-American psychotherapist and author (b. 1930).

Anna Freud

Anna Freud (03 December 1895 to 09 October 1982) was an Austrian-British psychoanalyst. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its normal “developmental lines” as well as incorporating a distinctive emphasis on collaborative work across a range of analytical and observational contexts.

After the Freud family were forced to leave Vienna in 1938 with the advent of the Nazi regime in Austria, she resumed her psychoanalytic practice and her pioneering work in child psychology in London, establishing the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952 (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) as a centre for therapy, training and research work.

J. Philippe Rushton

John Philippe Rushton (03 December 1943 to 02 October 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other apparent racial variations. His book Race, Evolution, and Behaviour (1995) is about the application of r/K selection theory to humans.

Rushton’s work was heavily criticised by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many alleging that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 to promote Eugenics, which worked actively with the Nazi party to promote theories of racial superiority and inferiority, and has been described as racist and white supremacist and designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Robert Zajonc

Robert Bolesław Zajonc (23 November 1923 to 03 December 2008) was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.

He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behaviour of humans alongside the behaviour of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behaviour. An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

He died of pancreatic cancer on 03 December 2008 in Palo Alto, California, and is survived by his wife Hazel Rose Markus and his four children.

Nathaniel Branden

Nathaniel Branden (born Nathan Blumenthal; 09 April 1930 to 03 December 2014) was a Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer known for his work in the psychology of self-esteem.

A former associate and romantic partner of Ayn Rand, Branden also played a prominent role in the 1960s in promoting Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.

Rand and Branden split acrimoniously in 1968, after which Branden focused on developing his own psychological theories and modes of therapy.