Browse

This book details how forensic art therapy was used in a capital murder case in which a man was tried for kidnapping his two children, murdering one, and attempting to kill the other. In this case, the prosecution sought the death penalty, while the defense employed an unusual strategy to avoid the sentence. The defendant's attorneys turned to more than one hundred examples of his artwork, which he had created over many years, to determine whether he was mentally ill at the time he committed the crimes. The book's author, an art therapist who was contracted by the defense to analyze the images that were to be presented as evidence in the case, recounts his findings and his testimony in court, as well as the future implications of his work for criminal proceedings. The book describes the role of the art therapist as an expert witness in a murder case, the way in which art can be used as evidence and the conclusions and assessments that professionals can draw from a defendant's artworks. It examines the effectiveness of expert testimony as communicated by the prosecution, defense and court, and weighs the moral, ethical, and legal consequences of relying on such evidence. The book shows how art can reflect a damaged and dangerous psyche and demonstrates the practical applications of an innovative approach to clinical assessment and treatment.

Should we feel inadequate when we fail to be healthy, balanced, and well-adjusted? Is it realistic or even desirable to strive for such an existential equilibrium? Condemning our current cultural obsession with cheerfulness and “positive thinking,” this book calls for a resurrection of character that honors our more eccentric frequencies and argues that sometimes a tormented and anxiety-ridden life can also be rewarding. The book critiques the search for personal meaning and pragmatic attempts to normalize human beings' unruly and idiosyncratic natures. Exposing the tragic banality of a happy life commonly lived, it instead emphasizes the advantages of a lopsided life rich in passion and fortitude. It also shows that what matters is not our ability to evade existential uncertainty but our courage to meet adversity in such a way that we do not become irrevocably broken. We are in danger of losing the capacity to cope with complexity, ambiguity, melancholia, disorientation, and disappointment, the book warns, leaving us feeling less “real” and less connected and unable to process a full range of emotions. Heeding the call of our character means acknowledging the marginalized, chaotic aspects of our being, and it is precisely these creative qualities that make us inimitable and irreplaceable.

In this book, thirty-five young, recently diagnosed patients speak about schizophrenia and the process of recovery, while two specialists illuminate the medical science, psycho-education, and therapeutic needs of those who are coping with the illness and accessing medical benefits and community resources. The book offers an informative guide to patients, families, friends, and professionals, detailing the possible causes of schizophrenia, its medications and their side effects, the functioning of the brain, and the value of rehabilitation and other services. In their dialogues, participants confront shame, stigma, substance use, and relapse issues. They also highlight the necessity of healthy eating, safe sex practices, and coping skills during recovery. The clinicians in the book elaborate on the symptoms of schizophrenia, such as violent and suicidal thoughts, delusions, hallucinations, memory and concentration problems, trouble getting motivated or organized, and anxiety and mood disorders. The book adopts an uplifting tone of manageability. In this way the clinicians and patients who contribute to this volume offer more than just advice—they prescribe hope.

Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified. Proliferating technologies command our attention. Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread. We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome. Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon. Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing. It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption. Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms. Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

Often people with mental illness feel alone in society, with no place to go and little hope. Their isolation can be further perpetuated through typical approaches to treatment, such as case management and psychotherapy. Since 1948, the Fountain House “working community” has worked to address the isolation and social stigmatization faced by people with mental illness. This volume describes in detail its evidence-based, cost-effective, and replicable model, which produces substantive outcomes in employment, schooling, housing, and general wellness. Through an emphasis on personal choice, professional and patient collaboration, and, most important, “the need to be needed,” this book demonstrates that people with serious mental illness can not only live but also contribute and thrive in society. This book also explores the evolution of Fountain House practice, which is grounded in social work and psychiatry and informs current strength-based and recovery methodologies. Its inherent humanity, social inclusivity, message of personal empowerment, and innovation—a unique approach on behalf of people suffering from mental illness—have led to the paradigm's worldwide adoption.

For countless generations people have been told that their potential as humans is limited and fundamentally unequal. The social order, they have been assured, is arranged by powers beyond their control. More recently the appeal has been to biology, specifically the genes, brain sciences, the concept of intelligence, and powerful new technologies. Reinforced through the authority of science and a growing belief in bio-determinism, the ordering of the many for the benefit of a few has become more entrenched. Yet scientists are now waking up to the influence of ideology on research and its interpretation. In Genes, Brains, and Human Potential, Ken Richardson illustrates how the ideology of human intelligence has infiltrated genetics, brain sciences, and psychology, flourishing in the vagueness of basic concepts, a shallow nature-versus-nurture debate, and the overhyped claims of reductionists. He shows how ideology, more than pure science, has come to dominate our institutions, especially education, encouraging fatalism about the development of human intelligence among individuals and societies. Genes, Brains, and Human Potential goes much further: building on work being done in molecular biology, epigenetics, dynamical systems, evolution theory, and complexity theory, it maps a fresh understanding of intelligence and the development of human potential. Concluding with an upbeat message for human possibilities, this synthesis of diverse perspectives will engender new conversations among students, researchers, and other interested readers.

Howard Andrew Knox (1885–1949) served as assistant surgeon at Ellis Island during the 1910s, administering a range of verbal and nonverbal tests to determine the mental capacity of potential immigrants. An early proponent of nonverbal intelligence testing (largely through the use of formboards and picture puzzles), Knox developed an evaluative approach that today informs the techniques of practitioners and researchers. Whether adapted to measure intelligence and performance in children, military recruits, neurological and psychiatric patients, or the average job applicant, Knox’s pioneering methods are part of contemporary psychological practice and deserve in-depth investigation. This book takes stock of Knox’s understanding of intelligence and his legacy beyond Ellis Island. Consulting published and unpublished sources, the book establishes a chronology of Knox’s life, including details of his medical training and his time as a physician for the U.S. Army. It describes the conditions that gave rise to intelligence testing, including the public’s concern that the United States was opening its doors to the mentally unfit. It then recounts the development of intelligence tests by Knox and his colleagues and the widely discussed publication of their research. The book presents a useful and extremely human portrait of psychological testing and its limits, particularly the predicament of the people examined at Ellis Island. It concludes with the development of Knox’s work in later decades and its changing application in conjunction with modern psychological theory.

This book explores the origin and growth of the human mind, drawing on archaeology, history, and the fossil record. It suggests that, as an indirect result of bipedal locomotion, early humans developed a feedback relationship among their hands, brains, and tools that evolved into the capacity to externalize thoughts in the form of shaped stone objects. When anatomically modern humans evolved a parallel capacity to externalize thoughts as symbolic language, individual brains within social groups became integrated into a “neocortical Internet,” or super-brain, giving birth to the mind. Noting that archaeological traces of symbolism coincide with evidence of the ability to generate novel technology, the book contends that human creativity, as well as higher order consciousness, is a product of the superbrain. It equates the subsequent growth of the mind with human history, which began in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. As anatomically modern humans spread across the globe, adapting to a variety of climates and habitats, they redesigned themselves technologically and created alternative realities through tools, language, and art. The book connects the rise of civilization to a hierarchical reorganization of the super-brain, triggered by explosive population growth. Subsequent human history reflects to varying degrees the suppression of the mind's creative powers by the rigid hierarchies of nationstates and empires, constraining the further accumulation of knowledge. The modern world emerged after 1200 from the fragments of the Roman Empire, whose collapse had eliminated a central that could thwart innovation. The text concludes with speculation about the possibility of artificial intelligence and the consequences of a mind liberated from its organic antecedents to exist in an independent, nonbiological form.

Erich Fromm was a political activist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. Known for his theories of personality and political insight, Fromm dissected the sadomasochistic appeal of brutal dictators while also eloquently championing love—which, he insisted, was nothing if it did not involve joyful contact with others and humanity at large. Admired all over the world, Fromm continues to inspire with his message of universal brotherhood and quest for lasting peace. The first systematic study of Fromm’s influences and achievements, this biography revisits the thinker’s most important works, especially Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving, which conveyed important and complex ideas to millions of readers. This book recounts Fromm’s political activism as a founder and major funder of Amnesty International, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and other peace groups. It reveals Fromm’s support for anti-Stalinist democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe and his efforts to revitalize American democracy. It further reveals Fromm’s direct contact with high officials in the American government on matters of war and peace while accessing a deeper understanding of his conceptual differences with Sigmund Freud, his rapport with Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, and his association with innovative artists, public intellectuals, and world leaders. The book portrays a man of immense authenticity and spirituality who made life in the twentieth century more humane than it might have been.

This book's author's son Tim is one of the “6 percent”—an American with serious mental illness. He is also one of the half million homeless people with serious mental illnesses in desperate need of help yet underserved or ignored by the health and social-service systems of the United States. In this moving, detailed exposé, the book describes how Tim and others like him come to live on the street. The text takes stock of the numerous injustices that kept Tim from realizing his potential from the time Tim first began to show symptoms of schizophrenia to the inadequate educational supports he received growing up, his isolation from family and friends, and his frequent encounters with the juvenile justice system and, later, the adult criminal-justice system and its substandard mental health care. Tim entered adulthood with limited formal education, few work skills, and a chronic, debilitating disease that took him from the streets to jails to hospitals and then back to the streets.

This book finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism. In the process, the state has used psychiatrists and psychologists to furnish knowledge on undesirable populations, and psychiatrists and psychologists have protected state interests. Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, the book analyzes the transformation of definitions for normal and abnormal behavior in a vast array of sources: government documents, professional bioethical debates, legal motions and opinions, psychiatric and psychological scholarship, media publications, and policy briefs. Critical themes emerge on the use of mental health in awarding or denying disability to returning veterans, characterizing the confinement of Guantánamo detainees, contextualizing the actions of suicide bombers, portraying Muslim and Arab populations in psychiatric and psychological scholarship, illustrating bioethical issues in the treatment of detainees, and supplying the knowledge and practice to deradicalize terrorists. The book explores this troublesome transformation of mental-health science into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.

One of therapy's greatest challenges is the moment of transference, when a patient unconsciously transfers emotion or desire to a new and present object—in some cases the therapist. During the course of treatment, a patient's projections and the analyst's struggle to divert them can stress, distort, or contaminate the therapeutic relationship. It may lead to various forms of enactment, in which the therapist unconsciously colludes with the client in interpretation and treatment, or it can lead to projective identification, in which the client imposes negative feelings and behaviors onto the therapist, further interfering with analysis and intervention. Drawing on decades of clinical case experience, this book leads practitioners through the steps of phantasy and transference mechanisms and their ability to increase, oppose, embrace, or neutralize analytic contact. Operating from a psychoanalytic perspective, it explains how to cope professionally with moments of transference and maintain an objective interpretive stance within the ongoing matrix of projective identification, countertransference, and enactment. The book discusses a wide spectrum of cases and clinical situations, describing in detail the processes that invite a playing out of the patient's phantasies and the work required to reestablish balance. It recognizes the imperfections of analysis yet reaffirms its potential for greater psychological integration and stability for the patient. It also acknowledges the limits and frequent roadblocks of working with difficult patients, such as those who suffer from psychic retreat, paranoid phantasies, and depressive anxieties, yet indicates an effective path for resetting the clinical moment and redirecting the course for treatment.

On December 21, 1972, sixteen young survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 were rescued after spending ten weeks stranded at the crash site of their plane, high in the remote Andes Mountains. The incident made international headlines and spawned several best-selling books, fueled partly by the fact that the young men had resorted to cannibalism to survive. This book examines this story from an evolutionary perspective, weaving together findings and ideas from anthropology, psychology, religion, and cognitive science. During their ordeal, these young men broke “civilized” taboos to fend off starvation and abandoned “civilized” modes of thinking to maintain social unity and individual sanity. Through the power of ritual, the survivors were able to endure severe emotional and physical hardship. The book ties their story to our story, seeing in the mortal rituals of this struggle for survival a reflection of what it means to be human.

The multimodal treatment of acute psychiatric illness involves a set of integrated, systematic interventions that stabilize individuals with severe mental illness and help them avoid unnecessary psychiatric hospitalization. This volume focuses on those suffering from schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, severe anxiety, and substance dependence, and provides individual practitioners and professional teams with the tools for responding to crisis and delivering acute care. The text includes real-world case examples, diagrams, and printable worksheets.

This book synthesizes key findings on a devastating mental disorder that has been increasingly studied over the past decade: namely, schizophrenia. Advances in epidemiology, translational neuroscience technology, and molecular and statistical genetics have recast schizophrenia's neurobiological nature, identifying new putative environmental risk factors and candidate susceptibility genes. Providing the latest clinical and neuroscience research developments, this book provides a balanced account, while pointing to future directions in research and interdisciplinary collaboration. The book examines relevant topics from the vantage points of epidemiologic, clinical, and basic neuroscience approaches.

Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards’s analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our conception of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others seem so effortlessly to enjoy. This book portrays love as a much more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than we tend to appreciate—an experience that helps us encounter the depths of human existence. Love's ruptures are as important as its triumphs, and sometimes love succeeds because it fails. At the heart of the book's argument is a meditation on interpersonal ethics that acknowledges the inherent opacity of human interiority and the difficulty of taking responsibility for what we cannot fully understand. Yet the fact that humans are often irrational in love does not absolve us of ethical accountability. In the book's view, we must work harder to map the unconscious patterns motivating our romantic behavior. As opposed to popular spiritual approaches urging us to live fully in the now, the book treats the past as a living component of the present. Only when we catch ourselves at those moments when the past speaks in the present can we keep ourselves from hurting the ones we love. Equally important, the book emphasizes transcending our individual histories of pain, an act that allows us to face the unconscious demons that dictate our relational choices.

"Picturing myself dying in a way I choose myself seems so comforting, healing and heroic. I'd look at my wrists, watch the blood seeping, and be a spectator in my last act of self-determination. By having lost all my self-respect it seems like the last pride I own, determining the time I die."-Kyra V., seventeen Reading the confessions of a teenager contemplating suicide is uncomfortable, but we must do so to understand why self-harm has become epidemic, especially in the United States. What drives teenagers to self-harm? What makes death so attractive, so liberating, and so inevitable for so many? In Teenage Suicide Notes, sociologist Terry Williams pores over the writings of a diverse group of troubled youths to better grasp the motivations behind teenage suicide and to humanize those at risk of taking their own lives. Williams evaluates young people in rural and urban contexts and across lines of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. His approach, which combines sensitive portrayals with sociological analysis, adds a clarifying dimension to the fickle and often frustrating behavior of adolescents. Williams reads between the lines of his subjects' seemingly straightforward reflections on alienation, agency, euphoria, and loss, and investigates how this cocktail of emotions can lead to suicide—or not. Rather than treating these notes as exceptional examples of self-expression, Williams situates them at the center of teenage life, linking them to abuse, violence, depression, anxiety, religion, peer pressure, sexual identity, and family dynamics. He captures the currents that turn self-destruction into an act of self-determination and proposes more effective solutions to resolving the suicide crisis.

The unexpected loss of a client can be a lonely and isolating experience for therapists. While family and friends can ritually mourn the deceased, the nature of the therapeutic relationship prohibits therapists from engaging in such activities. Practitioners can only share memories of a client in circumscribed ways, while respecting the patient's confidentiality. Therefore, they may find it difficult to discuss the things that made the therapeutic relationship meaningful. Similarly, when a therapist loses someone in their private lives, they are expected to isolate themselves from grief, since allowing one's personal life to enter the working relationship can interfere with a client's self-discovery and healing. For therapists caught between their grief and the empathy they provide for their clients, this collection explores the complexity of bereavement within the practice setting. It also examines the professional and personal ramifications of death and loss for the practicing clinician. Featuring original essays from longstanding practitioners, the collection demonstrates the universal experience of bereavement while outlining a theoretical framework for the position of the bereft therapist. Chapters cover the unexpected death of clients and patient suicide, personal loss in a therapist's life, the grief of clients who lose a therapist, disastrous loss within a community, and the grief resulting from professional losses and disruptions.

This book tackles a new, troubling trend in the theorizing of gender: that the learning styles, brain development, motivation, cognitive and spatial abilities, and “natural” inclinations of girls and boys are so fundamentally different, they require unique styles of parenting and education. Ignoring the science that challenges these claims, those who promote such theories make millions while frightening parents and educators into enforcing old stereotypes and reviving unhealthy attitudes in the classroom. This text unmakes the pseudoscientific rationale for this argument, stressing the individuality of each child and the specialness of his or her talents and desires. It recognizes that in our culture, girls and boys encounter different stimuli and experiences, yet encouraging children to venture outside their comfort zones helps them realize a multifaceted character.