This book, first published in 1637, was the first full-length treatise on suicide published in English. Originally published in 1988 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, the introduction by Michael MacDonald places the book in the context of attitudes to suicide in its day, as well as showing some of the ways that this theological book is also a study of the psychology and sociology of suicide. He discusses the evolution of the law of suicide and analyses the religious beliefs held about it at the time, before going on to look at John Sym himself and the structure of his book.

In Decoding Madness, forensic neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Lettieri gives a behind-the-scenes look at criminal psychology through case studies from his over 30 years of experience as a court-appointed and privately retained psychologist dealing with some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. From cases like Tina, who seriously injured her boyfriend and stabbed his son to death, to Michael who stabbed his mother in the back, believing she was the evil force causing the sun to descend upon the earth and gobble him up, Decoding Madness is filled with gripping stories and forensic analysis told from the author's perspective. Through psychological examination, it is his job to conclude whether these individuals are truly guilty and understand their actions are wrong, or if these individuals are not guilty due by reason of insanity and instead require treatment. Integrating insights from psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience, Dr. Lettieri contends that the legal system's view of human nature as governed by rationality is anachronistic. Nonetheless, he argues that our criminal justice system is slowly bending towards the humane. Decoding Madness offers a nuanced and in-depth psychological understating of defendants and their personal complexities beyond the usual clinical accounts offered by forensic psychologists. The book introduces the novel idea of the daimonic as a basic force of human nature that is the source of our constructive and destructive capacities. The venue of the criminal justice system, with its daily exposure to primal emotions, serves as a petri dish to investigate the full spectrum of our basic makeup.Dr. Lettieri brings these points home by presenting a nuts-and-bolts look into what it takes to complete psychological examinations of defendants accused of committing heinous crimes.

In American and NATO Veteran Reintegration, MaryCatherine McDonald and Gary Senecal examine mental health issues among former American service members. Data shows that American veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at significantly higher rates than veterans in other NATO ally countries involved in the war in Afghanistan. McDonald and Senecal argue that sociocultural factors, such as military training and civilian culture, have a dramatic impact on these rates.

Psychiatry suffers a lot of criticism, not least from within its own scientifically founded medical world. This book provides an account of mental health difficulties and how they are generally addressed in conventional medical circles, alongside critical reviews of the assumptions underpinning them to encourage more humanitarian perspectives.

How can we understand the pull towards that which we fear: psychosis?

In this thought provoking book, Abensour proposes the idea of a temptation towards psychosis rather than a regression, as a response to the hatred or denial of the subject s origins. She shares her reflections on her psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients focusing on their struggle to achieve a coherent sense of a self that can inhabit a shared world. Abensour locates this struggle within the universal human struggle to achieve a balance between what we can and cannot allow ourselves to know about the reality of death and of our insignificance in the world.

Emotional Transformation Therapy: An Interactive Ecological Psychotherapy describes an entirely original approach to psychotherapy that drastically accelerates therapeutic outcomes in terms of speed and long-term effects. It includes an attachment-based interpersonal approach that increases the impact of the therapist-client bond and is amplified by the precise use of the client's visual ecology. This synthesis is called Emotional Transformation Therapy (R) (ETT (R)). Steven R. Vazquez, PhD, discusses four techniques that therapeutically harness the client's visual ecology. When the client is asked to view a maximally saturated spectral chart of colors, visual feedback provides immediate diagnostic information that helps the therapist to regulate emotional intensity or loss of awareness of emotions. A second technique offers an original form of directed eye movement that facilitates relief of emotional distress within minutes. A third technique uses peripheral eye stimulation to rapidly reduce extreme emotional or physical pain within seconds as well as to access previously unconscious thoughts, emotions, or memories related to the issue or symptom. The fourth technique uses the emission of precise wavelengths (colors) of light into the client's eyes during verbal processing that dramatically amplifies the effect of talk therapy and changes the brain in profound ways. Emotional Transformation Therapy uses theory, research, and case studies to show how this method can be applied to depression, anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and complex trauma. Pre and post brain scans have shown that ETT (R) substantially changes the human brain. This method possesses the potential to revolutionize psychotherapy as we know it.

This Quick Reference Guide places the essentials of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)-the theory of interconnection between brain, mind and relationships-at the practitioner's fingertips. Designed to be at the therapist's side for easy reference, a 8.5"x11" laminated card presents a facet of this omnipresent topic in six easy-to-follow panels. Readers will find diagnosis criteria and treatment modalities for various forms of trauma as well as an overview of attachment theory and the essential neuroscience concepts of attachment. Quick Reference Guides are perfect as a brief refresher for the practitioner as well as a tool for their students and clients.

Millions of people struggle with severe clutter and hoarding. Barry Yourgrau is one of them. Behind the door of his apartment, Yourgrau's life is chaos. Confronted by his exasperated girlfriend, he embarks on a heartfelt, wide-ranging and too often uproarious project to take control of his apartment and life, and to explore the world of extreme hoarding. Encountering a professional declutterer, a Lacanian shrink and Clutterers Anonymous-not to mention Britain's most excessive hoarder-as well as explorations of the bewildering universe of new therapies and brain science, Yourgrau navigates uncharted territory: clearing shelves, boxes and bags; and sorting through a lifetime of messy relationships. Mess is the story of a man's efforts to let go, clean up his space (physical and emotional) and save his relationship.

Based on twenty years of intense qualitative research, Transcending Trauma presents an integrated model of coping and adaptation after trauma that incorporates the best of recent work in the field with the expanded insights offered by Holocaust survivors. In the book s vignettes and interview transcripts, survivors of a broad range of traumas will recognize their own challenges, and mental-health professionals will gain invaluable insight into the dominant themes both of Holocaust survivors and of trauma survivors more generally. Together, the authors and contributors Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen, Hannah Kliger, Lucy Raizman, Juliet Spitzer and Emilie Scherz Passow have transformed qualitative narrative analysis and framed for us a new and profound understanding of survivorship. Their study has illuminated universal aspects of the recovery from trauma, and Transcending Trauma makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how survivors find meaning after traumatic events.

Accompanying Transcending Trauma is a CD of full-text life histories that documents the survivor experience. In seven comprehensive interviews, survivors paint a picture of life before and after war and trauma: their own feelings, beliefs, and personalities as well as those of their family; their struggles to deal with loss and suffering; and the ways in which their family relationships were able, in some cases, to mediate the transmission of trauma across generations and help the survivors transcend the trauma of their experiences.

Perversion is a challenge for both theory and psychoanalytic practice. Juan Pablo Jimenez and Rodolfo Moguillansky, American psychoanalysts known for the originality of their contributions, offer us vivid and detailed clinical material of patients of analysis who presented various kinds of perversions, which they accompany by a comprehensive and accurate review of major psychoanalytic contributions on the subject, and their own contributions to it. The reader will find not only scholarship, but he will also find himself trapped in a thriller where the analyst is continually asked to leave his role as analyst to enter a game that fascinates and rejects. In a masterful way the authors describe their own internal vicissitudes in the treatment of these patients, the counter-transferential difficulties and how perversion becomes a source of inevitable collusions in the mind of the analyst. They take us to face, from an intersubjective perspective, to become aware of how the situations in which the classic transferential interpretation--when it is not attuned to the psychic reality of the patient--can retraumatize him and generate adverse events. We also count, as in thrillers, on researchers who help us review the facts and the storyline. The chapters of the book are accompanied by discussions with relevant well-known figures of psychoanalysis such as P. Fonagy, C. Featherson, and R. Krause. The end result enriches the reader with an exchange of opinions that is in agreement with the poliphonic character of current pluralistic psychoanalysis.

The Divided Self, R.D. Laing's groundbreaking exploration of the nature of madness, illuminated the nature of mental illness and made the mysteries of the mind comprehensible to a wide audience.

First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition, but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.

Laing's radical approach to insanity offered a rich existential analysis of personal alienation and made him a cult figure in the 1960s, yet his work was most significant for its humane attitude, which put the patient back at the centre of treatment.

Alcohol, opiates, cocaine and marijuana, among other drugs, have been used and abused for millennia. Prior to the disease model approach to drug addiction, which posits that addiction is a psychological and biological problem and that sufferers are victims, societies had a workable solution: let people consume what they want, and let informal cultural controls reinforce responsible behavior. Legal sanctions were reserved for any use that affected the safety of others. Blowing Smoke proposes an approach to the war on drugs that returns us to the pre-disease-model era. Dr. Reznicek asserts that addiction is not a medical problem to be treated in rehab or by prohibiting substance use. Rather, he debunks the disease model, arguing that it has exacerbated the problem by telling drug abusers that they are not responsible for their behavior, that they are sick, that they are not to blame. He skillfully argues for a new approach to drug use and abuse that requires a shift in the way we fight the war on drugs. Dr. Reznicek provides a new framework for understanding drug abuse: the habit model. Habits are practiced as long as they provide comfort, and are abandoned when they cause pain. The habit model is more consistent with current neuroscientific knowledge and it accounts for the widely observed phenomenon that most substance abusers don't change until they "hit bottom," the point where the consequences of drug use finally outweigh its benefits. Using the habit model, Dr. Reznicek suggests the solution to the drug problem is to turn back the clock, and to take lessons from societies that use social controls and consequences to deal with addiction and drug abuse. He recommends the legalization of drugs for adults, the implementation of social practices to dissuade abusers, and the end to the use of rehab as a way of handling addiction. Blowing Smoke shows how such an iconoclastic approach can work for us today.

This book provides a theoretical framework for empirically examining the impact of violence on marginalized peoples across the lifespan.  With anti-Black racism uniquely impacting Black women and girls who are sexually victimized, a unifying, empirically testable framework with a critical race perspective to examine Black women and girls' experiences of sexual violence is warranted. Dr. Jennifer M. Gómez created cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT) to expand the limiting assumption in the dominant theoretical and methodological literature on the impact of violence that traumas, such as rape, are solely interpersonal. In CBTT, Dr. Gómez builds on Black feminist scholarship, ethnic minority trauma psychology, and betrayal trauma theory to provide a theoretical framework for examining the impact of violence on marginalized peoples across the lifespan. The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls is the first book to use the CBTT research to contribute to academic and national discussions regarding anti-Black racism and sexual abuse. Using CBTT as a foundation, this book incorporates transdisciplinary scholarship on racism, intersectional oppression and intersectionality, sexual abuse against Black women and girls, cultural competency and critical consciousness in therapy, and healing in the community into a single resource for understanding and addressing oppression and sexual abuse on individual, institutional, and societal levels.