For the first time in history, behavioral health providers are expected to understand and participate in activities intended to access and improve the quality of services they provide. This handbook is designed as a general resource in the field of behavioral health quality management for a very diverse group of readers, including graduate and undergraduate students, payors, purchasers and administrators within managed care organizations, public sector service system planners and managers, applied health services researchers and program evaluators. This volume provides a comprehensive context for the development of quality management (QM) in health services - behavioral health in particular - as well as an overview of tools, techniques, and programs reflecting QM in practice. It also offers perspectives on both internally- and externally-based QM activities.

This book is written for researchers, undergraduate students and postgraduate students, physicians and traditional medicine practitioners who develop research in the field of neurosciences, phytochemistry and ethnopharmacology or can be useful for their practice. Topics discussed include the description of depression, its biochemical causes, the targets of antidepressant drugs, animal and cell models commonly used in the research of this pathology, medicinal plants and bioactive compounds with antidepressant activity used in traditional medicine, advances in nanotechnology for drug delivery to the brain and finally the future challenges for researchers studying this pathology.

The United States has taken a long and winding road to racial equality, especially as it pertains to relations between blacks and whites. On November 4, 2008, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the forty-fourth President of the United States and first black person to occupy the highest office in the land, many wondered whether that road had finally come to an end. Do we now live in a post-racial nation?
According to this book's contributors, a more nuanced and contemporary analysis and measurement of racial attitudes undercuts this assumption. They contend that despite the election of the first black President and rise of his family as possibly the most recognized family in the world, race remains a salient issue-particularly in the United States. Looking beyond public behaviors and how people describe their own attitudes, the contributors draw from the latest research to show how, despite the Obama family's rapid rise to national prominence, many Americans continue to harbor unconscious, anti-black biases. But there are whispers of change. The Obama family's position may yet undermine, at the unconscious level, anti-black attitudes in the United States and abroad. The prominence of the Obamas on the world stage and the image they project may hasten the day when America is indeed post-racial, even at the implicit level.

The World Health Organization states that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and predicts that by 2030 the epidemic of depression raging across the world will be the single biggest contributor to the overall burden of disease of all health conditions. Yet this gloomy picture masks a number of paradoxes concerning the diagnosis and cultural interpretation of depression that appear to challenge the claimed prevalence rates on which it is based. This book's essays by some of the world's leading researchers and scholars on depression explores these anomalies in detail from multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives, and in doing so reshapes the debate on the nature of depression that is currently under way in the US and abroad. At the book's core is the exploration from the multiple perspectives of a key dilemma: is the epidemic of depression real or is it just apparent? In particular, could it be the result of criteria laid down in the official American classification system of mental disorders, the DSM, interacting with cultural changes to reshape our view of melancholy, pathologizing what were formerly normal symptoms of grief or intense sadness? The debate over the DSM's conception of depression has an international relevance, with the WHO's upcoming revisions to its International Classification of Diseases requiring coordination with the DSM. This collection of perspectives has an unprecedented international dimension, as scholars from Europe and around the world join US academics to explore a central and controversial element of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis - and one that has enormous practical implications for the future of mental health care and how we view our emotions. The book's accessible essays will make it useful to scholars, practitioners, and students across a wide range of disciplines.

This inter-disciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.

The separation of powers and independent, judicial decision-making are generally accepted as hallmarks of the rule of law in democratic societies. Yet the exercise of executive discretion remains an important aspect of criminal justice in many areas. Protecting the Public? explores the tension between the rights of individuals detained under criminal and mental health law and the responsibility for public protection in the little-known world of executive discretion over mentally disordered offenders. It is based on extensive and unique empirical research conducted at the UK Home Office, with legal and clinical practitioners, with civil society organisations and by reference to comparative jurisdictions. Central questions considered include: executive, judicial and tribunal decision-making; mental health and criminal law reform regarding serious or high-risk offenders; the influence of human rights law on policy and practice; and the role of civil society, particularly victim interest groups, in public policy. Through its analysis of decisions to release 'high-risk' offenders, this book goes to the heart of the public protection agenda - examining how 'the public' is constructed and what protection is provided by the exercise of executive discretion. This book will be of interest to academic and other researchers, students, policy-makers, law reformers, commentators and anyone interested in the field of criminal justice, mental health law and public policy.

A few disorders have some of the same symptoms as schizophrenia including schizoaffective disorders, schizophreniform disorder, schizotypal and schizoid personality disorders, delusional disorder, and autism (schizophrenia spectrum disorders). Since the 2000 there has been significant progress in our understanding of the early presentations, assessment, suspected neuropathology, and treatment of these disorders. Recent technological breakthroughs in basic sciences hold promise for advancing our understanding of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. This collective monograph reviewers recent researches regarding the origins, onset, course, and outcome of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In particular, this book will be illustrate new developments in terms of conceptual models, and research methodology, genetics and genomics, brain imaging and neurochemical studies, neurophysiology and information processing in schizophrenia spectrum disorders patients. Also will be highlighted new developments in our understanding of the childhood psychosis, prodromal and first-episode states, in treatment and rehabilitation. Thus, the purpose of this book is to provide up-to-date overview of the rapid advances made in the clinical and basic science studies supporting our understanding of the relationship between cerebral processes and clinical, cognitive and other presentations of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. In addition, this book aims to monitor important research developments, which may be relevant to treatment, and rehabilitation of patients.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this important and fascinating book on the internal dilemmas youngsters face in school, which often cause them to stop learning. We are all too ready to ascribe learning problems to an inability to learn and leave it at that. This book should go a long way toward convincing us that using such simpleminded explanations and remedial efforts based on them do not work. Unlike other books that identify the causes of learning disabilities in children or that detail society's impact on the so-called helpless child, The Risks of Knowing is an in-depth study of young people who for reasons of intrapsychic conflicts and of intellectual development make a nega tive decision about the learning process. This book is unique in its thorough analysis of the conflicts young people have with learning and in its treatment prescriptions. In case after case, Karen Zelan demonstrates that if young people declare themselves unable to learn it is because for some valid reasons they believe learning is dangerous. The reasons that cause a decision to fail often remain unconscious until they are brought to the child's awareness. When the child is helped to understand the source of any inner dilemmas, both child and parents are able to find better solutions to immediate learning difficulties. Karen Zelan brings a rare expertise to the problems young people find in academic learning."

The Clinical Manual for the Treatment of Schizophrenia provides a wide-ranging, empirically based review of assessment and treatment issues in schizophrenia, offered from a multicultural and supremely patient-centered perspective. The following features reflect the care taken in developing this manual, as well as the inclusive nature of the contents: - The initial chapter offers a thorough introduction to the disease -- its history, etiology, epidemiology, risk factors, and social aspects -- seen through the lens of a case study. The chapter ends with an overview of the diagnostic process, allowing the reader to place what follows into context. - The basic science underlying schizophrenia is explained next, with coverage of biological markers; brain structure, function, and cytology; the dopamine and glutamate hypotheses; and the neurodevelopmental model of the disease. - The chapter on clinical assessment focuses on making the differential diagnosis according to established criteria, with emphasis on a person-oriented approach that takes into account early trauma, stressful events, and the subjective well-being of the patient. - Subsequent chapters explore cognition, comorbidity, substance abuse, and treatment-resistant symptoms in schizophrenia. - Finally, chapters on the pharmacological and psychosocial treatment of schizophrenia compare and contrast these approaches, ensuring that the reader is completely up-to-date and knowledgeable about available treatment options. Clinicians who work with schizophrenic patients in a variety of settings -- from private practice to emergency departments -- will benefit from the scholarship and experience of this manual's astute and insightful authors.

This volume, the first to specifically address the function of psychologists as practitioners and scientists in medical settings, presents a range of approaches to assessment and diagnostic practice rather than a litany of specific tools, diseases, or diagnostic problems. The comprehensive discussion, augmented by 41 case studies, addresses the psychological assessment of patients and their families using traditional neuropsychological and psychological diagnostic tools in various topic areas and settings. The application of assessment to issues such as ethics and law, professional self-assessment and credentialling, and the communication of diagnostic findings is also discussed.

As Freud predicted, there has always been great anxiety about the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary life, particularly in relation to its ambiguous and complicated relationship to the realm of science. There is also a long history of widespread resistance, in both academia and medicine, to anything associated with the world of the supernatural; very few people, in their professional lives, at least, are willing to admit a serious interest in occult phenomena. As a result, paranormal traces have all but vanished from the psychoanalytic process though not without leaving a residue. This residue remains, Brottman argues, in the acceptably clinical guise of projective identification, a concept first formulated by Melanie Klein, and widely used in contemporary psychoanalysis to suggest a different variety of transference and transference-like phenomena between patient and analyst that seem to occur outside the normal range of the sensory process.In this book, Brottman considers the nature and implications of the connections between projective identification and thought-transference, as well as the slightly embarrassing associations between ordinary psychoanalysis and telepathy. Her project, then, is to adumbrate the implications of the psychoanalytic notion of projective identification, with particular reference to the ways in which this concept can be considered a doorway from the traditional realm of psychoanalysis into the realm of the occult and paranormal. In particular, she considers the connections between projective identification and mind-reading, clairvoyance, and other well-known paranormal phenomena."

Military Sexual Trauma: Current Knowledge and Future Directions showcases the work of several prominent military sexual trauma (MST) researchers, scholars, and clinicians from across the United States. A review of existing research and original empirical findings converge to indicate that MST contributes to a range of physical health problems, complex posttraumatic responses, and other mental health consequences above and beyond the effects of other types of traumatic experiences. This collection also presents evidence suggesting that MST is often difficult to identify both within the individual military member and within the military population as a whole. Recommendations are offered for addressing this problem. In addition to the research review and empirical findings, an evolutionary framework for understanding sexual assault of women in the military is presented. Taken together, this collection of works may inform MST intervention and prevention efforts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.

No diagnosis of mental disorder is more important or more disputable than that of "schizophrenia." The 1982 case of John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan, brought both aspects of this diagnostic dilemma to the forefront of national attention. It became evident to the general public that the experts engaged to study him exhaustively could not agree on whether Hinckley was schizophrenic. General public outrage ensued, as schizophrenia, "the sacred symbol of psychiatry," in the words of Thomas Szasz (1976), emerged as a king of Alice in Wonderland travesty. Schizo phrenia seemed not to be a legitimate diagnostic entity but some sort of facade erected to protect the guilty. In 1973, David Rosenhan had already shown the readers of Science that schizo phrenia was a label that could be given to normal people presenting with a supposed auditory hallucination on even one occasion. In Rosenhan's studies, mental health professionals were outclassed by the regular psychiatric hospital patients, who cor rectly saw the false schizophrenics as imposters while the professional diagnosticians continued to fool themselves."

This fully updated, comprehensive text examines the assessment of intellectual abilities in children and adults. Chapters emphasize the rationale and techniques for measuring intellectual function in educational, clinical, and other organizational settings. The author includes detailed descriptions of the most widely used procedures for administering, scoring, and interpreting individual and group intelligence tests. This second edition features additional material on testing the handicapped, individual and group differences in mental abilities, theories and issues in the assessment of mental abilities, and new tests for measuring intelligence and related abilities.

The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with a survey of some of the major areas of clinical psychology. No attempt has been made to include every area relevant to clinical psychology; the choices are selective but represent the wide range of areas touched by clinical psychologists. For some years I have felt the need for a book that provides students with more of a historical introduction and context from which to view current clinical psychology than is included in most textbooks. The issues and problems of clinical psychology have been with us since the beginning of time; however, most psychological literature is written with the bias that anything older than five or ten years is not relevant. Those who attempt to take a long-range view of clinical psychology are sometimes able to recall the early development of the field in the 1930s and 1940s. In this text, I asked the authors to begin with a brief survey of ancient and medieval history to set the stage for a discussion of current research and developments in the field. I hope that a presentation of this sort will provide the reader-whether advanced undergraduate, graduate, or professional-with a sense of perspective and context from which to view and understand clinical psychology.

An easy, concise reference with inclusion of practical diagnostic and treatment information

Also appropriate for use by parents as a bibliotherapeutic aid

Contains quick reference section of the 20 most frequently seen behavioral problems and what actions to take

Written by a leading Pediatric Psychologist for use by not only Child Psychologists but also Pediatricians and Family Physicians

An important component of Division TEACCH's mandate from the Department of Psychiatry of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the North Carolina State Legislature is to conduct research aimed toward improving the understanding of developmental disabilities such as autism and to train the professionals who will be needed to work with this challenging population. An important mechanism to help meet these goals is our annual conference on topics of special importance for the understanding and treatment of autism and related disorders. As with the preceding books in this series entitled Current Issues in Autism, this most recent volume is based on one of these conferences. The books are not, however, simply published proceedings of conference papers. Instead, cer tain conference participants were asked to develop chapters around their pres entations, and other national and intemational experts whose work is beyond the scope of the conference but related to the conference theme were asked to contribute manuscripts as weil. These volumes are intended to provide the most current knowledge and professional practice available to us at this time."

The interactive computer-generated world of virtual reality has been successful in treat ing phobias and other anxiety-related conditions, in part because of its distinct advan tages over traditional in vivo exposure. Yet many clinicians still think of VR technology as it was in the 1990s-bulky, costly, technically difficult-with little knowledge of its evolution toward more modern, evidence-based, practice-friendly treatment. These updates, and their clinical usefulness, are the subject of Advances in Virtual Re ality and Anxiety Disorders, a timely guidebook geared toward integrating up-to-date VR methods into everyday practice. Introductory material covers key virtual reality concepts, provides a brief history of VR as used in therapy for anxiety disorders, ad dresses the concept of presence, and explains the side effects, known as cybersickness, that affect a small percentage of clients. Chapters in the book's main section detail current techniques and review study findings for using VR in the treatment of: * Claustrophobia. * Panic disorder, agoraphobia, and driving phobia. * Acrophobia and aviophobia. * Arachnophobia. * Social phobia. * Generalized anxiety disorder and OCD. * PTSD. * Plus clinical guidelines for establishing a VR clinic. An in-depth framework for effective (and cost-effective) therapeutic innovations for entrenched problems, Advances in Virtual Reality and Anxiety Disorders will find an engaged audience among psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and mental health counselors.eractive

SOME DISCLAIMERS It is somewhat unusual to begin a book by declaring what it is not, but the topic of police behavior is so complex that it requires the writer to state as early as possible the limits of what he has written here to describe and explain a police officer's experience. In order for the reader to get a clear idea of what areas of police behavior are to be described, it is nec essary to delineate those aspects of police behavior that are beyond the scope of this book. First of all, this book is about the psychological effects of police work on policemen: male police officers. Nearly all of the police officers with whom I have worked have been men, so my impressions and opinions are based on the experiences of male police officers. Consequently, descriptions and expla nations of the motivations, anxieties, psychological defenses, and resultant behavior of police officers must be limited to policemen. I believe that there are significant differences in the psychological effects of police work on men and women, but this book does not address this issue."

Historically, prevention in psychology has never been outright objectionable for mental health professionals. However, despite its acceptance, not enough practitioners engage in prevention and wellness promotion in their daily activities. This book offers mental health professionals and students the foundational knowledge necessary to engage in successful prevention and wellness promotion with clients across the lifespan. Written from a counseling psychology perspective, this handbook presents an approach to prevention that emphasizes strengths of individuals and communities, integrates multicultural and social justice perspectives, and includes best practices in the prevention of a variety of psychological problems in particular populations. Assembling 32 chapters into four comprehensive sections, this book provides expert coverage on: - fundamental aspects of prevention research and practice (i.e. the history of prevention, best practice guidelines, ethics, and evaluation) - relevant topics such as bullying, substance abuse, suicide, school dropout, disordered eating, and intimate partner violence - the promotion of wellness and adaptation in specific populations and environments, providing findings on increasing college retention rates, fostering healthy identity development, promoting wellness in returning veterans, and eliminating heterosexism and racism - the future of prevention, training, the intersection of critical psychology and prevention, and the importance of advocacy. Current and inclusive, this book will serve as a necessary and excellent resource to those interested in prevention research and practice.

Questions about the meaning, purpose, and pursuit of happiness and well-being have been addressed by thinkers since ancient times but over the past decade or so there has been a tremendous upsurge of scholarly interest in the subject. This renewed interest has come from a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, and economics. The field has, in particular, been galvanized by the advent of the positive psychology movement at the turn of the century. Especially in the United States, but also in the UK and on continental Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia, research and courses in positive psychology are thriving. Harvard University 's positive psychology course, for example, is currently the most popular offering in the college 's history.

Governments and international organizations are also increasingly engaged by notions of well-being and happiness. The World Health Organization has recently redefined health to include psychological well-being and many national policy-makers have begun to recognize that measuring a nation 's success by traditional economic values alone no longer suffices and that we need also urgently to understand how people experience the quality of their lives.

Beyond the academy and government, there is also immense interest in the promotion and examination of happiness and well-being in many professional disciplines such as coaching, education, clinical psychology, and community-building.

As work on happiness and well-being flourishes as never before, this new title in Psychology Press 's Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject 's vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Co-edited by two leading scholars, Happiness and Well-being is a four-volume collection of classic and contemporary contributions. Together, the four volumes provide a one-stop resource for all interested researchers, students, and policy-makers to gain a thorough understanding of the field, the variety of approaches, and where thinking on happiness and well-being is today. With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editors, which place the collected material in its historical, intellectual, and practical context, Happiness and Well-being is an essential work of reference and a vital research tool.

This book provides a practical guide to crisis intervention. It emphasizes the role of violence, patient suicide, long-term sequelae of trauma, clinical assessment and risk management, professional boundaries and burn-out, and the neurophysiology of trauma, as well as the needs of underserved patient populations including minority group members, older adults, gays and lesbians, and children. It features critical reviews of controversial topics, including EMDR, critical incident stress debriefing, recovered memories, dissociative identity disorder, and alternative medicine.

This volume of Advances in Clinical Child Psychology, which is the second under our editorship and the sixteenth of the series, continues the tradi tion of including a broad range of timely topics on the study and treat ment of children and adolescents. Volume 16 includes contributions per taining to prevention, adolescents, families, cognitive processes, and methodology. The issue of prevention in child clinical psychology is no longer restricted to a few speculative sentences in the future directions part of a discussion section. Prevention research is actually being undertaken, as reflected in two contributions to the volume. Winett and Anderson pro vide a promising framework for the development, evaluation, and dis semination of programs aimed at the prevention of HIV among youth. Lorion, Myers, Bartels, and Dennis address some of the conceptual and methodological issues in preventive intervention research with children. Adolescent development and adjustment is an important area of study in clinical child psychology. Two contributors address key and somewhat related topics, social competence and depression in adoles cence. Inderbitzen critically reviews the assessment methods and meth odologies for social competence and peer relations in adolescence. Reynolds analyzes contemporary issues and perspectives pertaining to adolescent depression."

This is the second book in Oxford's Guidebooks in Clinical Psychology series. This book provides practical guidelines on the treatment of anxiety disorders (the second most frequent clinical diagnosis), linking guidelines to empirical evidence. The authors review the several classifications of anxiety disorders using the latest DSM-IV categories, covering specific phobias, social phobia, panic disorder and agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among others. The chapters assess the efficacy of various treatments, and the authors conclude with a discussion of how treatment standards can be implemented in clinical training and practice.

This highly readable volume presents a concise but comprehensive overview of all that is known about autism, including its history, diagnosis, biological causes, neuropsychological mechanisms, and treatment. The authors offer an up-to-date review of the most current literature, summarized and organized in a manner that makes it accessible to everyone from clinicians to parents.