Psychiatry today is a barren tundra, writes medical historian Edward Shorter, where drugs that don't work are used to treat diseases that don't exist. In this provocative volume, Shorter illuminates this dismal landscape, in a revealing account of why psychiatry is "losing ground" in the struggle to treat depression.
Naturally, the book looks at such culprits as the pharmaceutical industry, which is not inclined to market drugs once the patent expires, leading to the endless introduction of new--but not necessarily better--drugs. But the heart of the book focuses on an unexpected villain: the FDA, the very agency charged with ensuring drug safety and effectiveness. Shorter describes how the FDA permits companies to test new products only against placebo. If you can beat sugar pills, you get your drug licensed, whether or not it is actually better than (or even as good as) current medications, thus sweeping from the shelves drugs that may be superior but have lost patent protection. The book also examines the FDA's early power struggles against the drug industry, an influence-grab that had little to do with science, and which left barbiturates, opiates, and amphetamines all underprescribed, despite the fact that under careful supervision they are better at treating depression, with fewer side effects, than the newer drugs in the Prozac family. Shorter also castigates academia, showing how two forms of depression, melancholia and nonmelancholia--"as different from each other as chalk and cheese"--became squeezed into one dubious classification, major depression, which was essentially a political artifact born of academic infighting.
An astonishing and troubling look at modern psychiatry, Losing Ground is a book that is sure to spark controversy for years to come.

Solution-oriented therapy focuses on eliciting, evoking, and highlighting the strengths of clients, as opposed to their pathology and deficits. Here, Robert Bertolino explains his great success in applying this model to the treatment of adolescents. He describes how to work with these young clients to help empower them to change their life scripts.

In the last three decades, mediation has been increasingly used in the United States and elsewhere. Much has been written about the philosophical underpinnings and ethical dilemmas of mediation as well as its applications both within judicial systems and beyond the limits of these systems. However, some very basic challenges remain: How can entrenched positions, strong emotions, and cultural differences be dealt with? Mediation expertise is truly achieved when a mediator learns to overcome these challenges through experience and intuition. To speed up the learning curve of mediation expertise, Jean Poitras, PhD, and Susan Raines, PhD have benchmarked the mediation process in Expert Mediators: Overcoming Mediation Challenges in Workplace, Family, and Community Conflicts. Tapping the experience and wisdom of over 175 highly qualified mediators from across different realms of the mediation practice (e.g., family mediation, workplace mediation, commercial mediation) and across geographic regions (e.g., U.S., Australia, Europe, Israel, Canada), this book integrates best practices in order to improve the performance of mediators. For each proposed strategy, this book discusses conditions under which each practice should be used as well as approaches to mitigate risks associated with using each strategy and technique.

Since classical times, philosophers and physicians have identified anger as a human frailty that can lead to violence and human suffering, but with the development of a modern science of abnormal psychology and mental disorders, it has been written off as merely an emotional symptom and excluded from most accepted systems of psychiatric diagnosis. Yet despite the lack of scientific recognition, anger-related violence is often in the news, and courts are increasingly mandating anger management treatment. It is time for a fresh scientific examination of one of the most fundamental human emotions and what happens when it becomes pathological, and this thorough, persuasive book offers precisely such a probing analysis.
Using both clinical data and a variety of case studies, esteemed anger researchers Raymond A. DiGiuseppe and Raymond Chip Tafrate argue for a new diagnostic classification, Anger Regulation and Expression Disorder, that will help bring about clinical improvements and increased scientific understanding of anger. After situating anger in both historical and emotional contexts, they report research that supports the existence of several subtypes of the disorder and review treatment outcome studies and new interventions to improve treatment. The first book that fully explores anger as a clinical phenomenon and provides a reliable set of assessment criteria, it represents a major step toward establishing the clear definitions and scientific basis necessary for assessing, diagnosing, and treating anger disorders.

The first of two volumes, it traces the roots of psychotherapy in ancient times, through the influence of Freud and Jung up to the events following the second world war. The book shows how the history of psychotherapy has evolved over time through different branches and examines the offshoots as they develop. Volume 2 traces the evolution of psychotherapy from the 1950s and the later 20th century through to modern times, considering what the future of psychotherapy will look like. Each part of the book represents a significant period of time or a decade of the 20th century and provides a detailed overview of all significant movements within the history of psychology. It will be essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of clinical psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, the history of medicine and psychology.

This book explores the subject of artificial psychology and how the field must adapt human neuro-psychological testing techniques to provide adequate cognitive testing of advanced artificial intelligence systems. It shows how classical testing methods will reveal nothing about the cognitive nature of the systems and whether they are learning, reasoning, and evolving correctly; for these systems, the authors outline how testing techniques similar to/adapted from human psychological testing must be adopted, particularly in understanding how the system reacts to failure or relearning something it has learned incorrectly or inferred incorrectly. The authors provide insights into future architectures/capabilities that artificial cognitive systems will possess and how we can evaluate how well they are functioning. It discusses at length the notion of human/AI communication and collaboration and explores such topics as knowledge development, knowledge modeling and ambiguity management, artificial cognition and self-evolution of learning, artificial brain components and cognitive architecture, and artificial psychological modeling. Explores the concepts of Artificial Psychology and Artificial Neuroscience as applied to advanced artificially cognitive systems; Provides insight into the world of cognitive architectures and biologically-based computing designs which will mimic human brain functionality in artificial intelligent systems of the future; Provides description and design of artificial psychological modeling to provide insight into how advanced artificial intelligent systems are learning and evolving; Explores artificial reasoning and inference architectures and the types of modeling and testing that will be required to "trust" an autonomous artificial intelligent systems.

Clinical Interventions in Criminal Justice Settings balances theoretical frameworks and research methodology to examine the effective evidence-based practices and principles for populations within the criminal justice system. The book explores the major clinical issues that are relevant for adopting evidence-based practices and demonstrates how to implement them. Topics include legislation, law enforcement, courts, corrections, actuarial assessment instruments, treatment fidelity, diverse populations, mental illness, substance use and juvenile delinquency. Clinical Interventions in Criminal Justice Settings models opportunities for evidence-based practice during entry into the criminal justice system (arrest), prosecution (court, pretrial release, jail, and prison), sentencing (community supervision, incarceration), and corrections (jail, prison, probation and parole).

Advances in the Study of Behavior, Volume 50 provides users with the latest insights in this ever-evolving field. Users will find new information on a variety of species, including social behaviors in reptiles, the behavioral evidence of felt emotions, a section on developmental plasticity, a chapter on covetable corpses and plastic beetles and the socioecological behavior of burying beetles, and a section on the mechanisms of communication and cognition in chickadees. This volume makes another important contribution to the development of the field by presenting theoretical ideas and research findings to professionals studying animal behavior and related fields.

This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health.

Psychotherapists have an ethical requirement to inform clients about their treatment methods, alternative treatment options, and alternative conceptions of their problem. While accepting the basis for this "informed consent" requirement, therapists have traditionally resisted giving too much information, arguing that exposure to alternative therapies could cause confusion and distress. The raging debates over false/recovered memory syndrome and the larger move towards medical disclosure have pushed the question to the fore: how much information therapists should provide to their clients?

In Negotiating Consent in Psychotherapy, Patrick O'Neill provides an in-depth study of the ways in which therapists and clients negotiate consent. Based on interviews with 100 therapists and clients in the areas of eating disorders and sexual abuse, the book explores the tangle of issues that make informed consent so difficult for therapists, including what therapists believe should be part of consent and why; how they decide when consent should be renegotiated; and how clients experience this process of negotiation and renegotiation.

Adopting a friendly but critical approach to the talking therapies, this book places psychotherapy in a social and historical context, exploring its relationship to contemporary culture and recommending a different way of thinking about practice.

There are certain phenomena, such as hypnosis, hysteria, multiple personality disorder, recovered memory syndrome, claims of satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction syndrome, and culture-specific disorders that, although common, are difficult to explain completely. The purpose of this volume is to apply a model of social relations to these phenomena in order to provide a different explanation for them. Wenegrat argues that they are socially-constructed illness roles or purposive behavior patterns into which patients fall while receiving either unintentional or intentional cues during interactions with caretakers and authority figures. The application of the social-relations model raises some important, yet previously overlooked, questions about these phenomena, illustrates some important aspects of human nature and consciousness, places illness behaviors in their larger, cultural context, and shows the way to a new and different view of mental life.

The last 10 years have seen an upturn in the number of people reporting difficulties with emotional and mental health issues, particularly anxiety and depression. And, it is often the strongest who struggle under the weight of all they have nobly tried to shoulder. Turn to the Bible, and this truth is played out in the lives of some of its greatest characters. King David led a nation - yet wrote some of the Bible's bleakest laments. Elijah worked outlandish public miracles - and later pleaded God to take his life. Dedicated, hardworking mother and woman of God Naomi acknowledged that she had become characterised by bitterness. And lifelong God follower Job found himself longing for a death that would not come. This book affirms that depressive illness can strike anyone - not least the capable, busy people with the `can-do' attitude of the title. This special bespoke edition for the Christian market takes a destigmatising, thoroughly informed approach to depression, with a foreword by Will Van Der Hart, whose own experience of ill mental health led to him founding Mind & Soul, the leading Christian mental health organisation.

Psychoanalytic thought has already transformed our basic assumptions about the psychic life of individuals and cultures. Those assumptions often take on the valence of common sense. However, this can mean that their original and important meanings often become obscured. Disruptive ideas become domesticated. At War with the Obvious aims to return those ideas to their original disruptive status. Donald Moss explores a wide range of issues-the loosening of constraints on deep systematized forms of hatred, clinical, and technical matters, the puzzling status of revenge and forgiveness, a consideration of the dynamics of climate change denial, and an innovative look at the problem of voice in the clinical situation. Because it is rooted in a profound reconsideration of the origins of psychic life, psychoanalysis remains vital, in spite of the perennial efforts to keep it effaced and quieted. Moss covers a range of central psychoanalytic concepts to argue that only by examining and challenging our everyday assumptions about issues like sexuality, punishment, creativity, analytic neutrality, and trauma, can psychoanalysis offer a radical alternative to other forms of therapy. At War with the Obvious will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, cultural theorists and anyone for whom incisive psychoanalytic thought matters.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.