This book serves as a training manual for mental health professionals and other community members who desire a practical "handbook" to guide their work with adult children from dysfunctional families in both individual and group counseling. An approach to the resolution of trauma is offered, along with prevention and intervention techniques for use with children and adolescents from dysfunctional families in school and other community-based settings. Group psychoeducation is highlighted as a tool for the delivery of curricula, covering diverse topics such as how to engage in healthy parenting behavior, how the stress of immigration/migration contributes to the creation of dysfunctional families, how to attain cultural sensitivity, as well as how to prevent or stop violent behavior. Always practical, Dr. Wallace provides a timely and comprehensive guide for community mental health promotion at a time when multiple, overlapping epidemics undermine family functioning.

This book offers a new approach by combining the disciplines of history, psychology, and religion to explain the suicidal element in both Western culture and the individual, and how to treat it. Ancient Greek society displays in its literature and the lives of its people an obsessive interest in suicide and death. Kaplan and Schwartz have explored the psychodynamic roots of this problem--in particular, the tragic confusion of the Greek heroic impulse and its commitment to unsatisfactory choices that are destructively rigid and harsh. The ancient Hebraic writings speak little of suicide and approach reality and freedom in vastly different terms: God is an involved parent, caring for his children. Therefore, heroism, in the Greek sense, is not needed nor is the individual compelled to choose between impossible alternatives.

In each of the first three sections, the authors discuss the issues of suicide from a comparative framework, whether in thought or myth, then the suicide-inducing effects of the Graeco-Roman world, and finally, the suicide-preventing effects of the Hebrew world. The final section draws on this material to present a suicide prevention therapy. Historical in scope, the book offers a new psychological model linking culture to the suicidal personality and suggests an antidote, especially with regard to the treatment of the suicidal individual.

A comprehensive book written by experienced practitioners, this single-volume work describes clinical competencies, specific challenges, and applications in providing services to the elderly and their caregivers. More people are living past age 65 than ever before in the United States, largely due to medical care advances and increased attention to preventive care. The number of people aged 65 and older has increased from 35 million in 2000 to 40 million in 2010, and the elderly population is expected to reach 72 million by 2030. Additionally, the American Psychological Association estimates at least 20 percent of all people aged 65 and older have a diagnosable mental disorder. There is a clear need to provide additional training support to those in the field of elder care as well as those who are friends or family members of older adults. Written by a team of experts each specializing in an aspect of elder care, The Praeger Handbook of Mental Health and the Aging Community is a single-volume text that addresses the training needs of mental health care providers serving the aging population. It offers holistic and integrated models of care after presenting an in-depth explanation of the brain, body, social, and emotional changes across aging that can trigger psychological disorders. The chapters pay attention to issues of diversity and culture in America's aging population; present an integrated care model to serve all of the needs of mentally ill elders; include numerous case studies to demonstrate how approaches can be utilized; and discuss topics such as disability, poverty, and the legal and ethical ramifications of elder care.

Dimensions of Human Behavior: The Changing Life Course presents a current and comprehensive examination of human behavior across time using a multidimensional framework. Author Elizabeth D. Hutchison explores both the predictable and unpredictable changes that can affect human behavior through all the major developmental stages of the life course, from conception to very late adulthood. Aligned with the 2015 curriculum guidelines set forth by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the Sixth Edition has been substantially updated with contemporary issues related to gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social class and disability across the lifespan.

What are the human consequences of conflict and what are the appropriate service responses? This book seeks to provide an answer to these important questions, drawing on over twenty-five years of work by the author in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Focusing on the work undertaken following the Omagh bombing, the book describes how needs were assessed and understood, how evidence-based services were put in place, and the training and education programmes that were developed to assist first those communities affected by the bombing and later the wider population affected by the years of conflict. The author places the mental-health needs of affected communities at the heart of the political and peace processes that follow. This is a practical book and will be of particular interest to those planning for and responding to conflict-related disasters, policy makers, service commissioners and providers, politicians, civil servants and peace makers. -- .

Beauty is often an invisible yet potent presence in clinical work. The Psychology of Beauty: Creation of a Beautiful Self, by Ellen Sinkman, LCSW, addresses the vital importance of beauty, its sources, and manifestations in everyone s lives including psychotherapy patients. The ability to be mesmerizingly beautiful and beautifully creative, strivings toward mastering beauty, and wishes to be transformed are universal desires. During psychotherapy, patients manifest or defend against these forces. So it is striking that patients as well as therapists often overlook or dismiss issues about creating beauty in themselves. The book introduces this seeming contradiction with the ancient myth of Pygmalion and his sculpture of a beautiful woman. These enduring mythic figures represent the wish to emerge as a beautiful being and the wish for the power to create beauty in another. Patients in psychotherapy often pursue these elusive goals outside clinical work, rather than within treatment. Manifold venues enticingly promise reinvention. These activities may involve plastic surgery, beauty salon make-overs, diet gurus, elocution coaches, tattooing, and athletic training. Seekers of beauty engage with people whom they see as agents offering them ravishing physical or charismatic attractiveness. Psychotherapists may or may not be among agents seen as having the power to transform. The quest for beauty is widespread and in many instances non-pathological. Sinkman looks at multiple avenues of understanding and appreciation of efforts toward beauty, including artistic creativity and political activities. However there is a spectrum of investment in creating beauty. Pursuing beauty can become pathological. Therapists need to watch out for its appearance outside the psychoanalytic arena. Such material can be missed when the analyst falls into counter-transference difficulties such as feeling invested in transforming the patient, identifying with the patient s narcissistic injuries and/or needs to compete, or enacting battles with the patient. Such difficulties interfere with attunement to patients experiences. The Psychology of Beauty considers definitions of beauty, gender identity themes, and origins of beauty in the mother-infant relationship. It investigates ugliness, sadomasochistic beauty pursuits, evolutionary factors, and aspects of aging. The book highlights emerging clinical material which has yet to gain notice and suggests what analysts may be missing, and why."

Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh most closely associated with overseas migration, has seen an increase in remittances sent home from abroad, introducing new inequalities. Social change has also been mediated by the global forces of Western biomedicine and orthodox Islam. This book examines the effects of these modernizing trends on mental health and on local, traditional healing as the new inequalities have exacerbated existing social tensions and led to increased vulnerability to mental illness. It is the young women of Sylhet who are most affected. The global economy has increased competition for resources and led to marriage being seen as a route to economic advancement. Parents prefer to give their daughters in marriage to families that will widen their social contacts and enhance their economic and social standing. Accordingly, the young wife's outsider status (and hence vulnerability to mental illness) has increased as it is no longer customary to give daughters in marriage to local kin. Yet, patients and their families do not work out tensions passively. They are active agents in the construction of their own diagnosis. The extent to which patients act or are acted upon is an investigation that runs throughout the book.

Alyson Callan is a psychiatrist and anthropologist. She currently works as a consultant psychiatrist in Brent for the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.

There has been a major shift in the way we conceptualize and provide services to children and adolescents with mental health needs. We are moving away from the traditional disorder-oriented model of treatment to a child-centered, family-focused service delivery system that mandates mental health services in the context of the child's family and social ecology. This new system of care has spawned many variations of the model, including wraparound services, multisystemic treatment (MST), futures planning, and person-centred planning.
As systems of care are different across countries and cultures, it is imperative that we share our knowledge and make explicit the lessons we have learned in our attempts to provide services to children and adolescents which focus on improving their quality of life rather than merely treating their psychiatric disorders and psychological problems. There is an urgent need to evaluate the various treatments being offered to children and adolescents with mental health needs. Empirical date on outcomes will determine the funding and delivery of services. As such, the latest research on treatment outcomes needs to be disseminated so that new and validated treatment methods can be implemented rapidly.