The American Latino: Psychodynamic Perspectives on Culture and Mental Health Issues focuses on the culture of the Hispanic population in the United States and replaces stereotypes with portrayals based on factual information. The scope of the material covered is vast and includes the topics of ethnic identity, gender roles, religion and spirituality, family resilience, and the joys and sufferings of leading a bicultural life. Opening with a thorough survey of Latin-American immigration to the United States and closing with an illustration-rich discourse on being a Hispanic-American psychotherapist in this country, the contributors examines with both normative and psychopathological realms. Help-seeking patterns, vulnerability of some Hispanic youth to drugs and gang-related affiliations, and the fine technical adjustments in conducting psychotherapy with individuals of this growing subpopulation are elucidated with great compassion and empathy. The American Latino is a shining document of the coexistence of universal similarity and cultural uniqueness of the human psyche. Reading it will enhance knowledge, enrich attunement, and sharpen therapeutic skills for working with Latin American clients.

What does it mean to be 'present and accounted for' when a family member is facing chronic illness or death? How does one define a self in relation to the ill or dying member and the family? Rooted in Murray Bowen's family systems theory, this edited volume provides conceptual ideas and applications useful to clinicians who work with families facing chronic illness or the death of a member. The text is divided into four parts: Part I provides a detailed overview of Bowen's theory perspectives on chronic illness and death and includes Murray Bowen's seminal essay "Family Reaction to Death." In Parts II and III, chapter authors draw upon Bowen theory to intimately explore their families' reactions to and experiences with death and chronic illness. The final part uses case studies from contributors' clinical practices to aid therapists in using Bowen systems perspectives in their work with clients. The chapters in this volume provide a rich and broad range of clinical application and personal experience by professionals who have substantial knowledge of and training in Bowen theory. Death and Chronic Illness in the Family is an essential resource for those interested in understanding the impact of death and loss in their professional work and in their personal lives.

Therapeutic Trances is a manifesto of the fundamental principles and techniques of Ericksonian hypnotherapy. This innovative volume lays out the principles and practice of developing relationships with patients and creating a hypnotic environment in which true healing can take place. The book offers therapists specific questions to ask and practical ideas to pursue, thereby illustrating how therapists may cooperate with clients to translate problems into solutions. Stephen Gilligan synthesizes the approaches of Erickson, Bandler & Grinder, and Bateson to bring a new perspective to the field.

Practicing Intersubjectively describes how the intersubjective systems perspective informs, shapes and guides the psychotherapeutic process. Using extensive clinical case material, Buirski illustrates the way an intersubjective systems sensibility informs and enriches clinical practice. The intersubjective systems perspective views each treatment as exquisitely context sensitive. This means that the person who comes for therapy would present differently to different therapists and the two of them would construct different processes. Therapists themselves are not interchangeable, and the intersubjective field that the two participants create together would be quite different from the field created by any other pair. Practicing Intersubjectively, with the focus on attuning and articulating to the contextual construction of personal worlds of experience enables a different therapy process to unfold than occurs in traditional 1-person, authority based treatment approaches and is uniquely suited to working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds and those suffering from such challenging concerns as trauma and prejudice.

This is an insightful and essential new volume for academics and professionals interested in the lived experience of those who struggle with disordered eating. Embodiment and Eating Disorders situates the complicated - and increasingly prevalent - topic of disordered eating at the crossroads of many academic disciplines, articulating a notion of embodied selfhood that rejects the separation of mind and body and calls for a feminist, existential, and sociopolitically aware approach to eating disorder treatment. Experts from a variety of backgrounds and specializations examine theories of embodiment, current empirical research, and practical examples and strategies for prevention and treatment.

There are many types of interpersonal violence that can lead to short- and long-term physical and psychological effects on those involved. Reducing Interpersonal Violence reflects on the World Health Organization's stance that interpersonal violence is a public health problem and considers what steps can realistically be taken towards its reduction. Clive Hollin examines interpersonal violence across a range of settings, from bullying at school and in the workplace, smacking children and partner violence in the home, to sexual and other forms of criminal violence in the community. This book summarises the research on evidence-based strategies to reduce violence and shows that reducing interpersonal violence can have a positive effect on people's wellbeing and may save a great deal of public expenditure. This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in the fields of psychology, criminology, law, and police studies, as well as professionals such as probation staff and forensic psychologists.

Developmental theory is the essence of any psychodynamic psychother apy, and certainly of psychoanalysis. It is through an understanding of progressive life events, and the way these events relate to associated biological and social events, that we come to understand both psycho pathology and psychological strengths. For a long time we have needed a clinically oriented book that surveys normal development in both childhood and adulthood. This book should be particularly helpful to all mental health professionals whose daily work requires a constant awareness and appraisal of devel opmental issues. Dr. Colarusso has integrated and summarized a tremen dous amount of theoretical, empirical, and clinical material in a format that makes it come alive through clinical examples. This book should be of great interest to all students of human behav ior as well as to seasoned clinicians. SHERWYN M. WOODS, M. D., PH. D. vii Preface Each year as I gave a lecture series on child and adult development to the adult and child psychiatric residents at the University of California at San Diego, someone inevitably would ask, "Is there a book that I could understand that has all of this information in it?" I would reply that I did not know of any single source, but I could refer the person to many articles and books on development."

This comprehensive resource outlines the latest research and recommendations to provide you with the requisite knowledge, skills, and awareness to treat TNGC clients with competent and affirming care. As you know, TNGC clients have different needs based on who they are in relation to the world. Written by three psychologists who specialize in working with the TGNC population, this important book draws on the perspective that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for working with TNGC clients. It offers interventions tailored to developmental stages and situational factors-for example, cultural intersections such as race, class, and religion. This book provides up-to-date information on language, etiquette, and appropriate communication and conduct in treating TGNC clients, and discusses the history, cultural context, and ethical and legal issues that can arise in working with gender diverse individuals in a clinical setting. You'll also find information about informed consent approaches that call for a shift in the role of the mental health provider in the position of assessment and referral for the purposes of gender-affirming medical care (such as hormones, surgery, and other procedures). As changes in recent transgender health care and insurance coverage have provided increased access for a broader range of consumers, it is essential to understand transgender and gender nonconforming clients' different needs. This book provides practical exercises and skills you can use to help TNGC clients thrive.

This practice-focused resource demonstrates effective uses of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy methods and techniques in treating clients across various conditions, settings, and subgroups. Client problems featured include both those often associated with REBT (e.g., anxiety, depression, anger) and others noted for complex presentations, difficulties with engagement, and impasses (e.g., addictions, suicidality, psychosis). Challenging treatment populations are covered as well, including women, couples, families, elder and pediatric clients, clients with disabilities, and sexual minorities. These stimulating cases show how well the diversity of clients and their concerns is matched by the flexibility of techniques and applications within REBT. In each chapter, expert therapists: * Identify concepts in REBT especially suited to approaching the problem or population. * Outline best REBT practices in assessment and treatment of the client(s). * Survey evidence-based non-REBT approaches most useful in complementing REBT. * Provide a brief case example representing appropriate REBT in action. * Assess their use of REBT in treating the problem or members of the population. A bedrock text for REBT scholar-practitioners, REBT with Diverse Populations and Problems is a testimony to the continuing usefulness of the therapy and its adaptability as client populations emerge and as the contexts of client problems evolve in response to a demanding world.

The central problem in the study of addiction is to explain why people repeatedly behave in ways they know are bad for them. For much of the previous century and until the present day, the majority of scientific and medical attempts to solve this problem were couched in terms of involuntary behavior; if people behave in ways they do not want, then this must be because the behavior is beyond their control and outside the realm of choice. An opposing tradition, which finds current support among scientists and scholars as well as members of the general public, is that so-called addictive behavior reflects an ordinary choice just like any other and that the concept of addiction is a myth. The editors and authors of this book tend to take neither view. There has been an increasing recognition in recent literature on addiction that restricting possible conceptions of it to either of these extreme positions is unhelpful and is retarding progress on understanding the nature of addiction and what could be done about it. This book contains a range of views from philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and the law on what exactly this middle ground between free choice and no choice consists of and what its implications are for theory, practice and policy on addiction. The result amounts to a profound change in our thinking on addiction and how its devastating consequences can be ameliorated. Addiction and Choice is a thought provoking new volume for all those with an interest in this global issue.

Designed for clinicians from a variety of backgrounds, this handbook provides useful information regarding long-term treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. It is intended not only for psychiatrists and neurologists, but also for primary care physicians and non-physician mental health professionals. The book examines maintenance treatment for a comprehensive list of mental illnesses including biopolar disorders, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, and dementia. It provides the clinician with the information needed to select and manage the effective long-range treatment of their patients.

Suicide is a perplexing human behavior that remains among the leading causes of death worldwide, responsible for more deaths each year than all wars, genocide, and homicide combined. Although suicide and other forms of self-injury have baffled scholars and clinicians for thousands of years, the past few decades have brought significant leaps in our understanding of these behaviors. This volume provides a comprehensive summary of the most important and exciting advances in our understanding of suicide and self-injury and our ability to predict and prevent it. Comprised of a formidable who's who in the field, the handbook covers the full spectrum of topics in suicide and self-injury across the lifespan, including the classification of different self-injurious behaviors, epidemiology, assessment techniques, and intervention. Chapters probe relevant issues in our society surrounding suicide, including assisted suicide and euthanasia, suicide terrorism, overlap between suicidal behavior and interpersonal violence, ethical considerations for suicide researchers, and current knowledge on survivors of suicide. The most comprehensive handbook on suicide and self-injury to date, this volume is a must-read text for graduate students, fellows, academic and research psychologists, and other researchers working in the brain and behavioral sciences.

Community psychology emphasizes an ecological approach to mental health by focusing on the individual in the environment and the influences that shape and change behavior. Becoming Ecological brings together the work of James G. Kelly, one of the founders of community psychology and among the field's national leaders.
The volume unites thirteen of Kelly's publications from 1968 to 2002 as well as four new essays on current issues in the field: the theory, research, practice, and education of community psychologists. Kelly introduces the work by offering connections between his personal experiences and the topics he chose to focus on throughout his long career. He begins each of the thirteen essays with commentary that sets the article in its original context so that the reader has a historical perspective on why certain ideas were salient at a particular time and how they are still timely today. Kelly concludes with a "summing up" section integrating the previously published articles with the four new essays. Throughout, he presents examples of how to plan and carry out research and practice in the community. The principles underlying the examples both enhance the relevance of the research and practice and increase the potential of community residents to use the findings for their own purposes.
A compendium of classic statements of community psychology's philosophical and historical underpinnings, Becoming Ecological is a must-read for scholars and practitioners of community psychology and for those in the fields of public health, social work, community development, education, and applied anthropology.

Self-examination and self-critique: for psychoanalytic patients, this is the conduit to growth. Yet within the field, psychoanalysts haven't sufficiently utilized their own methodology or subjected their own preferred approaches to systematic and critical self-examination. Across theoretical divides, psychoanalytic writers and clinicians have too often responded to criticism with defensiveness rather than reflectivity. De-Idealizing Relational Theory attempts to rectify this for the relational field. This book is a first in the history of psychoanalysis; it takes internal dissension and difference seriously rather than defensively. Rather than saying that the other's reading of relational theory is wrong, distorted, or a misrepresentation, this book is interested in querying how theory lends itself to such characterizations. How have psychoanalysts participated in conveying this portrayal to their critics? Might this dissension illuminate blind-spot(s) and highlight new areas of growth? It's a challenge to engage in psychoanalytic self-critique. To do so requires that we move beyond our own assumptions and deeply held beliefs about what moves the treatment process and how we can best function within it. To step aside from ourselves, to question the assumed, to take the critiques of others seriously, demands more than an absence of defensiveness. It requires that we step into the shoes of the psychoanalytic Other and suspend not only our theories, but our emotional investment in them. There are a range of ways in which our authors took up that challenge. Some revisted the assumptions that underlay early relational thinking and expanded their sources (Greenberg & Aron). Some took up specific aspects of relational technique and unpacked their roots and evolution (Mark, Cooper). Some offered an expanded view of what constitutes relational theory and technique (Seligman, Corbett, Grossmark). Some more directly critiqued aspects of relational theory and technique (Berman, Stern). And some took on a broader critique of relational theory or technique (Layton, Slochower). Unsurprisingly, no single essay examined the totality of relational thinking, its theoretical and clinical implications. This task would be herculean both practically and psychologically. We're all invested in aspects of what we think and what we do; at best, we examine some, but never all of our assumptions and ideas. We recognize, retrospectively, how very challenging a task this was; it asked writers to engage in what we might think of as a self-analysis of the countertransference. Taken together these essays represent a significant effort at self-critique and we are enormously proud of it. Each chapter critically assesses and examines aspects of relational theory and technique, considers its current state and its relations to other psychoanalytic approaches. De-Idealizing Relational Theory will appeal to all relational psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Self-examination and self-critique: for psychoanalytic patients, this is the conduit to growth. Yet within the field, psychoanalysts haven't sufficiently utilized their own methodology or subjected their own preferred approaches to systematic and critical self-examination. Across theoretical divides, psychoanalytic writers and clinicians have too often responded to criticism with defensiveness rather than reflectivity. De-Idealizing Relational Theory attempts to rectify this for the relational field. This book is a first in the history of psychoanalysis; it takes internal dissension and difference seriously rather than defensively. Rather than saying that the other's reading of relational theory is wrong, distorted, or a misrepresentation, this book is interested in querying how theory lends itself to such characterizations. How have psychoanalysts participated in conveying this portrayal to their critics? Might this dissension illuminate blind-spot(s) and highlight new areas of growth? It's a challenge to engage in psychoanalytic self-critique. To do so requires that we move beyond our own assumptions and deeply held beliefs about what moves the treatment process and how we can best function within it. To step aside from ourselves, to question the assumed, to take the critiques of others seriously, demands more than an absence of defensiveness. It requires that we step into the shoes of the psychoanalytic Other and suspend not only our theories, but our emotional investment in them. There are a range of ways in which our authors took up that challenge. Some revisted the assumptions that underlay early relational thinking and expanded their sources (Greenberg & Aron). Some took up specific aspects of relational technique and unpacked their roots and evolution (Mark, Cooper). Some offered an expanded view of what constitutes relational theory and technique (Seligman, Corbett, Grossmark). Some more directly critiqued aspects of relational theory and technique (Berman, Stern). And some took on a broader critique of relational theory or technique (Layton, Slochower). Unsurprisingly, no single essay examined the totality of relational thinking, its theoretical and clinical implications. This task would be herculean both practically and psychologically. We're all invested in aspects of what we think and what we do; at best, we examine some, but never all of our assumptions and ideas. We recognize, retrospectively, how very challenging a task this was; it asked writers to engage in what we might think of as a self-analysis of the countertransference. Taken together these essays represent a significant effort at self-critique and we are enormously proud of it. Each chapter critically assesses and examines aspects of relational theory and technique, considers its current state and its relations to other psychoanalytic approaches. De-Idealizing Relational Theory will appeal to all relational psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

This clinician manual presents the Accept Yourself! Program, which is derived from empirically supported interventions (including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Health At Every Size) that have a demonstrated ability to enhance women's mental and physical health. This book offers a clear, research-based, and forgiving explanation for clients' failure to lose weight, helpful guidance for clinicians who are frustrated with poor client weight loss outcomes, as well as a liberating invitation to clients to give up this struggle and find another way to achieve their dreams and goals.

People with disordered personalities are much more likely than most to practice substance abuse, attempt suicide, and suffer from major anxiety and depressive disorders. They are also more difficult to treat for mental disorders, and their chances of relapse are greater. Clearly then, it is essential that mental health professionals be able to identify and cope with personality disorders in their patients. Unfortunately, the task of accurately assessing disordered personalities based solely on nebulous, polythetic categories such as those provided in the DSMTM is akin to that of the three blind men who were asked to describe an elephant. What is needed is a new approach to conceptualizing personality disorders based on observable behaviors rather than inferential nosologies. In this book, Charles G. Costello lays the foundations for just such an approach.

Reculer pour mieux sauter—to retreat so as to better leap ahead—i s the phrase Dr. Costello uses to articulate the spirit in which this book was conceived. Stated more practically, his goal in presenting this volume is to afford psychotherapists an opportunity to step back from questionable clinical categories and redirect their attention onto the individual personality traits commonly associated with personality disorders—to more clearly define them, their origins, and their functional relationships—and in so doing, open up new avenues for research and provide clinicians with a surer conceptual footing upon which to base diagnoses and devise treatment strategies.

To achieve that end, Dr. Costello invited a group of leading researchers and clinicians in the field to share their understanding of the current state of knowledge about personality disorders. Over the course of eleven chapters, each devoted to a separate personality characteristic, these experts review the latest research data and offer their professional insights into the major personality characteristics of the personality disordered, including aggressiveness, anxiousness, emotional instability, impulsiveness, dependency, narcissism, detachment, paranoia, obsessiveness, and sensation-seeking.

Personality Characteristics of the Personality Disordered is a valuable resource for clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and all mental health practitioners, as well as personality theorists and researchers.

SYMPTOMS OF DEPRESSION

Edited by Charles G. Costello

This groundbreaking book advances our understanding of depression by directing focus away from the global syndrome of depression and onto the individual symptoms it comprises. Some of the field's foremost researchers and clinicians share their findings and offer insights into all major symptoms of depression, including dysphoria, anhedonia, sleeping problems, hopelessness, suicide attempts, social dysfunction, cognitive dysfunction, eating problems, and more. Each symptom is discussed using a common format: definition, measurement, frequency of occurrence, a review of clinical and experimental findings that have led to the current theories of the causes of the symptom, its functional relationship to other symptoms of depression, and implications for clinical practice.

1993 (0-471-54304-7) 322 pp.

SYMPTOMS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

Edited by Charles G. Costello

This volume offers readers an opportunity to step back from unwieldy clinical categories of syndromes and redirect their attention onto the symptoms that comprise those syndromes. Leading clinicians and researchers in the field review the current state of knowledge about the major symptoms common to schizophrenic disorders and share their insights into thinking disorders, hallucinations, delusions, disorders of affect, ambivalence, social withdrawal, anhedonia, psychomotor abnormalities, and more. Symptoms are treated in individual chapters in order of: definition, measurement, frequency, a review of clinical and experimental findings that have led to current theories of the causes of the symptom, its functional relationships to other symptoms, and implications for clinical practice.

1993 (0-471-54875-8) 320 pp.

DISORDERS OF PERSONALITY DSM-IV and Beyond Second Edition

Theodore Millon and Roger D. Davis

This fully revised second edition of Theodore Millon's landmark work guides researchers, teachers, and students through the special complexities of this group of disorders and aids clinicians in the difficult work of diagnosis. A compelling new feature of this edition is its revised theoretical framework—the learning theory biosocial approach has grown into a more evolutionary model that includes constructs applicable to phylogenesis and human adaptive styles. Other new features include: the expansion of the 15 basic personality prototypes into personality disorder subcategories; an enlarged review of historical and contemporary thinking on personality disorders; an expanded "clinical picture" segment for each chapter; and comprehensive reviews of the newer personality prototypes, such as avoidant, narcissistic, borderline, schizotypal, depressive, sadistic, and masochistic. This Second Edition also includes new chapters on personality assessment and personality therapy and an up-to-date review of available instruments, as well as an expanded and detailed discussion of short-term, focused therapy.

1995 (0-471-01186-X) 768 pp.

'This book explores with refreshing clarity the complexities and challenges of working with child sexual abuse in the family environment. Describing a victim-centred, family approach based on clear ethical principles and with reference to their own practice experiences, Tolliday, Spangaro and Laing offer a resource which will be of huge practical use for any professional working to address child sexual abuse.' - Simon Hackett, Professor of Child Abuse and Neglect, Durham University.

This book provides a concise overview of sexuality and gender identity in clients with intellectual disabilities for therapists, social workers, educators, and healthcare providers. It captures the social, political, and legal environment of the late 2010s and bridges the gap between research and practice, with engaging case examples drawn from the author's own practice. Guidance on everyday issues like dating and sex education is juxtaposed with material on complex, current issues in topics like LGBTQ inclusion and sexual offending. User-friendly "toolboxes" provide brief guides to practical issues like using trans-friendly language and providing family interventions. Accessible enough for students and trainees, but thorough enough for veteran clinicians, this book explores issues that professionals face in providing competent care through the lens of justice and inclusion.

Diversity-Sensitive Personality Assessment is a comprehensive guide for clinicians to consider how various aspects of client diversity-ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, religion, regionalism, socioeconomic status, and disability status-can impact assessment results, interpretation, and feedback. Chapters co-written by leading experts in the fields of diversity and personality assessment examine the influence of clinician, client, interpersonal, and professional factors within the assessment context. This richly informed and clinically useful volume encourages clinicians to delve into the complex ways in which individuals' personal characteristics, backgrounds, and viewpoints intersect. This book fills an important gap in the personality assessment literature and is an essential resource for clinicians looking to move beyond surface-level understandings of diversity in assessment.

The Exercise Effect on Mental Health contains the most recent and thorough overview of the links between exercise and mental health, and the underlying mechanisms of the brain. The text will enhance interested clinicians' and researchers' understanding of the neurobiological effect of exercise on mental health. Editors Budde and Wegner have compiled a comprehensive review of the ways in which physical activity impacts the neurobiological mechanisms of the most common psychological and psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. This text presents a rigorously evidence-based case for exercise as an inexpensive, time-saving, and highly effective treatment for those suffering from mental illness and distress.

This volume offers a collection of ten case studies from clinical social workers who work in the field of sexual trauma, with the objective of challenging and informing social work practice with survivors and perpetrators of sexual trauma. These steps are meant to help the process of treatment by breaking down the experience of trauma to a set of steps and interventions aimed at resolving traumatic symptoms within a given time frame. Our text seeks to challenge the tendency towards reductionism inherent in the dominant social paradigm by encouraging the development of a phenomenological and interdisciplinary approach to understanding sexual trauma. In doing so, the examples of interventions presented in each case study reflect practice methods that honor the complexity of the human experience of sexual trauma, suffering, and recovery.

Modern Myths and Medical Consumerism is concerned with the loss of a sense of limit in technological medicine today, and the way in which the denial of death leads to an uncontrollable, consumeristic multiplication of needs. Taking its starting point from C. G. Jung's analytical psychology, the book gives a symbolic interpretation based on archetypal, philosophical and socio-psychoanalytic ideas developed through the author's personal experience, moving from the medical to the psychoanalytical paradigm. Lanfranchi depicts ideal sources of medicine, based on archetypal material drawn from Greek myth, and discusses the progressive steps of the doctor's consciousness' evolution up to contemporary times. Critiquing current medicine and its 'modern myths', the book suggests the prevailing model of economic development is unsustainable, and provides prospects of a more contained ecological medicine and an ethical approach that will allow readers to reflect and move towards a more qualified attitude to mortality. The book meets the need to transform medicine into a critical domain of human experience, capable of providing essential services consistent with the naturalness of death and environmental sustainability. As such, it will be vital reading to academics in the fields of psychotherapy, analytical psychology, psychiatry and medicine, and those with a philosophical or sociological background.

Depressive Realism argues that people with mild-to-moderate depression have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressives. Depressive realism is a worldview of human existence that is essentially negative, and which challenges assumptions about the value of life and the institutions claiming to answer life's problems. Drawing from central observations from various disciplines, this book argues that a radical honesty about human suffering might initiate wholly new ways of thinking, in everyday life and in clinical practice for mental health, as well as in academia. Divided into sections that reflect depressive realism as a worldview spanning all academic disciplines, chapters provide examples from psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and more to suggest ways in which depressive realism can critique each discipline and academia overall. This book challenges the tacit hegemony of contemporary positive thinking, as well as the standard assumption in cognitive behavioural therapy that depressed individuals must have cognitive distortions. It also appeals to the utility of depressive realism for its insights, its pursuit of truth, as well its emphasis on the importance of learning from negativity and failure. Arguments against depressive realism are also explored. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of depressive realism within an interdisciplinary context. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of psychology, mental health, psychotherapy, history and philosophy. It will also be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors.

This book explores the discourse of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one of the most debated mental health categories attributed to children and adults across the globe. The authors trace the origins, development and representation of ADHD to demonstrate how the category is produced through competing explanatory theories and processes of scientific, professional and lay discourse. Starting with the idea that medical categories are as much a product of cultural meaning, social processes and models of medicine as they are of scientific fact, this book utilises a range of perspectives from within critical discursive psychology to approach this topic. The authors discuss historical construction, media representation, parents' accounts of family life, and the personal experience of children and adults to demonstrate how the construction of social identity and cultural stereotypes are embedded in the meaning of ADHD. They explore the origins of ADHD and how biological and psychosocial explanations of the mental health category have been produced, circulated, debated and resisted within a culture of 'Othering', and the discourse of blame.