Are you in a significant relationship with someone who has an addiction? Are you frustrated with watching your addicted loved ones destroy their lives? Whether your relationship is with a family member, friend, or partner, caring about an addicted person can feel like a nightmare. If someone you love is abusing drugs or alcohol or is engaging in addictive behaviors such as disordered eating, problem gambling, smoking, Internet addiction, a controlling relationship, or compulsive overspending, there is hope. Loving an Addict, Loving Yourself: The Workbook will show you how your life can improve by helping you to understand what will and won't work in your relationship with your addicted loved one--and in your relationship with yourself. As you become familiar with the top ten survival tips for loving someone with an addiction, you will learn how to offer healthier and more effective choices to your addicted loved one. Once you do this, you will feel a sense of realistic control in your life. In turn, this will increase your self-respect, which is, without a doubt, the most important thing you can change about yourself.

Unconditional helps those experiencing the challenges of intense emotional issues to let them know they are not alone. Unconditional takes readers through Allison Garner's own journey with her daughter as they face her daughter's emotional, mental, and behavioral struggles. With bracingly honest reflection, Allison shares her own struggles learning how to parent a child with major emotional and mental struggles, from multiple suicide attempts to cutting school. She openly admits to the thoughts most mothers never have the courage to say out loud and tackles her own growth head-on to show parents that it's okay not to have all the answers-and they don't have to be a "normal" parent or "good" mother. Including excerpts from her daughter's journal, Unconditional, while not shying away from reality, paints a beautiful picture of hope and growth on an imperfect journey and reassures parents that there is nothing wrong with them or their children.

In Understanding Abnormal Child Psychology, students will learn about both normative and abnormal development throughout children's lives. Consistent with previous editions, several themes run throughout the book: Developmental psychopathology: Children's and adolescents' behaviors are on a continuum (from very adaptive to very maladaptive), with only the very severe ends of the spectrum being conceptualized as disorders. Diversity, inclusion, and understanding: Special attention is given to issues of race/ethnicity, gender, family constellation, religious orientation, primary language, socioeconomic status, and physical differences to help students see the commonalities and differences of abnormal child behavior within a cross-cultural and international context. New to the 4th edition Completely revised in both structure and content to reflect the DSM-5 Increase coverage of risk factors related to long-term effects of sexual abuse and bullying. Increased coverage of diversity to include new "diversities" that have emerged as important, i.e. transgender children New research on suicide and suicide prevention

An explicit and disturbing look at the dark side of the human psyche, presented through a collection of utterly fascinating abnormal psychology cases. Clinical and research psychologist Miguel Brooks takes us deep into the minds of sexual sadists and predators, psychopaths, obsessive-compulsive and mood-disordered persons, as well as the guilt-burdened, depressed, suicidal, and the twisted weirdoes we all encounter but often fail to understand. Taken from his extensive clinical diaries, these chronicles reveal, in unusual and impacting detail, the harrowing psycho-emotional descent into a desperate hell, known only to those who have been there.

In this revised, updated and expanded edition, the author explores the life of Theodore Bundy, one of the more infamous-and flamboyant-American serial killers on record. Bundy's story is a complex mix of psychopathology, criminal investigation, and the U.S. legal system. This in-depth examination of Bundy's life and his killing spree that totaled dozens of victims is drawn from legal transcripts, correspondence and interviews with detectives and prosecutors. Using these sources, new information about several murders is unveiled. The biography follows Bundy from his broken family background to his execution in the electric chair.

The effects of mental disorder are apparent and pervasive, in suffering, loss of freedom and life opportunities, negative impacts on education, work satisfaction and productivity, complications in law, institutions of healthcare, and more. With a new edition of the 'bible' of psychiatric diagnosis - the DSM - under developmental, it is timely to take a step back and re-evalutate exactly how we diagnose and define mental disorder.
This new book by Derek Bolton tackles the problems involved in the definition and boundaries of mental disorder. It addresses two main questions regarding mental illness. Firstly, what is the basis of the standards or norms by which we judge that a person has a mental disorder - that the person's mind is not working as it should, that their mental functioning is abnormal? Controversies about these questions have been dominated by the contrast between norms that are medical, scientific or natural, on the one hand, and social norms on the other. The norms that define mental disorder seem to belong to psychiatry, to be medical and scientific, but are they really social norms, hijacked and disguised by the medical profession?
Secondly, what is the validity of the distinction between mental disorder and order, between abnormal and normal mental functioning? To what extent, notwithstanding appearances, does mental disorder involve meaningful reactions and problem-solving? These responses may be to normal problems of living, or to not so normal problems - to severe psycho-social challenges. Is there after all order in mental disorder?
With the closing of asylums and the appearance of care in the community, mental disorder is now in our midst. Whileattempts have been made to define clearly a concept of mental disorder that is truly medical as opposed to social, there is increasing evidence that such a distinction is unviable - there is no clear line between what is normal in the population and what is abnormal. 'What is Mental Disorder?' reviews these various crucial developments and their profound impact for the concept and its boundaries in a provocative and timely book.

Rationality and Compulsion presents a unique examination of mental illness - derived from philosophical action theory. Delusion is common to many mental disorders, resulting in actions that, though perhaps rational to the individual, might seem entirely inappropriate or harmful to others. So what is it that causes these actions, and why do they continue? The theory expounded in this book shows how the key to this problem might be compulsion.
This book presents a new analysis of the notion of compulsion - developed from action theory. The books starts with an introduction to action theory (for the benefit of non-philosophers). It then shows how insights from action theory can help us better understand mental illness, before developing an analysis of compulsion that emphasizes the element of unavoidability. The book argues that what is fundamentally disturbing to the person suffering from delusion is not so much the fact that the disorder tends to lead to irrational actions but rather the fact that he or she is unable to avoid performing these actions. The individual is or feels compelled to act in the way he or she does. The book contains some concrete illustrations of this idea as applied to several psychiatric diagnoses, such as paranoia, phobia, and psychopathy.
Rationality and Compulsion is a highly original new work from a leading figure in the philosophy and psychiatry movement. It will advance our understanding of mental illness, and be valuable for psychiatrists, psychologists, as well as philosophers.