PRESIDENT'S REPORT

By Lucy Scott

We have three very exciting plans in place for the upcoming year.

NEW WEBSITE
We are very pleased to announce that the William Glasser Association of B.C. is launching a new website which should be up and running by the end of August. We shall provide links to the Glasser Institute in Los Angeles and the new Canada Institute website. We shall also provide links for those certified members who wish to have a connection to their own website. To have your website linked please give me a call. The URL for our new website is www.wgabc.org

MINI CONFERENCE
Dr. William Glasser will be our featured speaker at the October 24, 2003 Mini Conference this year. We know this will be a very popular choice of conference on the provincial teachers development day, so we are encouraging those of you who are interested in attending to register early. The conference will be held at General Gordon Elementary School in Vancouver and the number of participants will be limited. Cost to WGABC members is $50.

AGM PRESENTATION
On Saturday, November 22, 2003 at our Annual General Meeting, Dr. Marshall Wilensky will be our guest speaker. Dr. Wilensky is the founder of EMDR (Eye Movement, Desensitization and reprocessing) in Vancouver. EMDR is an information processing therapy which integrates many effective psychotherapies and uses an 8 phase approach based on eye movements. This external stimulus is used to help clients become aware of how eye movements affect thought, feeling, images and memory. Dr. Wilensky will be presenting this workshop from 10:00 AM -12:00 PM on November 2nd. This workshop is open to members and friends interested in enhancing their personal or professional development. A registration form will be mailed out in late October. The cost will be $10.00 for members and $15.00 for non-members. A half-hour AGM will follow the workshop in the Unitarian Church at 9th Ave. and Oak St.

Forty degrees and 80% humidity greets you as you step out of the hotel. Inside the beautiful lobby it is temperate and comfortable. 230 participants from all over the world are enjoying the facilities and are learning. This is the first and last Joint Conference of the Willlam Glasser Institute and the Glasser Quality School Consortium. The original mandate of the consortium has been done for some time by the Institute and the formal dissolution of the consortium will happen next July.

The Kansas City Conference was succesful. Forty-five presentations and workshops were held by 39 presenters. Topics represented a broad range of interest areas:

• Elementary and secondary school corrections
• University teaching
• Personal applications
• RT/CT/LM teaching methods
• Ethics
• Spirituality
  

In addition, Dr. Glasser, as keynote presenter, provided an overview of his latest thinking published in the book Warning: Psychiatry Maybe Hazardous To Your Mental Health (briefly reviewed in this newsletter).

As usual the conference provided excursions in the evening. One such was a Jazz pub crawl to four different venues; the other a tour of Kansas City, City of Fountains, followed by a dinner. Being busy with the program at this conference, I was pleased to hear so many positive comments about the program as well as the amenities provided for participants and presenters. I look forward to Chicago in 2004. You can check out the information on the Institute website.

BOOKS

Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous To Your Mental Health
by Dr. William Glasser

Brief Summary by Rolf Ahrens

Those who have heard Dr. Glasser speak know his views of the role of drugs in counseling. In this book, Dr. Glasser elaborates his definition of happiness and explains that the symptoms described in DSM IV do not describe mental illness but behavior exhibited by unhappy people.

Dr. Glasser defines and elaborates a continuum of degrees of unhappiness between mental health and mental illness. To make his point he compares this continuum to one between health and illness. Thus we have:

• Physically Healthy out of shape Physically Ill
• Mentally Healthy unhappy Mentally Ill

According to Dr. Glasser, unhappiness is the cause of the symptoms that are now all too often labelled mental illness by psychiatrists and treated with brain drugs. The foreword by Terry Lynch, author of Beyond Prozac, is excellent as are the resources listed at the back of the book and in the Appendix. As expected this book offers a sensible and preferred alternative to being drugged.

The following materials may be purchased from the Institute:

1. The Glasser Quality School: A New Approach to Character Education by Dr. William Glasser. This 28 page booklet, written by Dr. Glasser, relates to the material already explained in "Every Student Can Succeed, Choice ~ Theory and The Quality School to Character Education." The cost is $5.00 and includes shipping and handling.
2. A Collection of Handouts by Carleen Glasser. Increase your professionalism with these 29 photocopy masters of up-to-date ideas. The cost of $20.00 includes shipping and handling.
3. Teaching Choice Theory to High School Students in Class Meetings by Carleen Glasser. 16 page ~ handbook provides Choice Theory topics and sample questions for classroom meetings. The cost of $5.00 includes shipping and handling.
4. Class Meeting by A1 Katz: A New Audiotape. This tape can be of assistance to Institute faculty for teaching school intensive weeks. It can also be useful for teachers who want to build a more meaningful , classroom environment. The cost of $10.00 includes shipping and handling.

• Aug. 22, 2003 - San Antonio TX
  American Psychotherapy Assocation
  
• Sep. 5 - 7, 2003 - Cleveland OH
  A Touch Of Serenity
• Oct. 24, 2003 - Vancouver BC
  William Glasser Association of B.C.
  
• Oct. 25 - 27, 2003 - Lansing MI
  Michigan Counseling Association
• Nov. 22, 2003 - Akron OH
  Clinic For Child Study & Family Counseling University of Alberta
• Dec. 11 - 14, 2003 - San Francisco CA
  The Milton H. Erickson Foundation, Inc.
• Feb. 26 - 27, 2004 - Stevens Point WI
  The Wisconsin School Counselor Association