This volume contains current evidence-based diagnosis and therapeutic interventions for people with mental disorders. Students and professionals alike will find the mental health field addressed as a whole in a coherent and understandable way. Readers are offered a unified presentation of psychological and sociological approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative. " -H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946) Doctors are trained to treat people suffering from various diseases. This is the main form of their activity and usually the reason for which they selected medicine as their profession. The notion that they should become managers and engage in activi ties such as programming, calculating cost, assessing cost-benefit ratios, and thinking about pricing in accordance with the social utility of their intervention, is both foreign and abhorrent to them. They are sometimes willing to say how much they need in order to have a well-functioning service: usually they prefer to state what specific apparatus and other things they require without specifying the price of their demand. They can be persuaded to add a price tag to what they think is necessary for their work: but that was about as far as they would go, until recently. The growing emphasis on human rights over the past few decades, the greater emphasis on quality of life and the public's heightened expectations about their health led, in many industrialized countries, to a greater demand for health services. This, com bined with improved possibilities of diagnosis and treatment (at higher cost!), led to a significant increase in financial demands which made governments and health-care systems uneasy and ready to accept any solution that would stop the spiral of seem ingly endless cost augmentation.

Two ofthe most important notions concerning the rights of people with mental illness are among the most neglected: the first is that human rights and duties are complementary and that both must be considered in constructing a framework for mental health care. The second is that we must strive for equity and not only for equality in developing mental health programs. The first ofthese notions is complex. It refers to the duties ofpeople with mental illness and to the duties ofthose who surround them. Mental illness does not liberate the person who has it from civic obligations. The most basic ofthese is to give support to others and to refuse to harm them Their carers, society and the patient's self-respect all gain through their recognition, even though the fulfilment of these obligations might be difficult or impossible in certain periods ofillness. The duty of those surrounding the patients is to recognise and respect their existence and to make the necessary arrangements to respond to their needs, protect their rights and compensate for their temporary or permanent inability to fulfil their civic duties. A society's social capital is the public good that results from the mutual supportofmembers ofa society: iffor one reason or another, some or all members ofa society fail to offer such support the social capital will diminish and the society will cease to be civic.

This volume contains current evidence-based diagnosis and therapeutic interventions for people with mental disorders. Students and professionals alike will find the mental health field addressed as a whole in a coherent and understandable way. Readers are offered a unified presentation of psychological and sociological approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

The two most important notions concerning the rights of people with mental illnesses are among the most neglected: the first is that human rights and duties are complementary and that both must be considered in constructing a framework for mental health care. The second is that we must strive for equity in developing mental health programs. Inequity and Madness: Psychosocial and Human Rights Issues addresses both these notions. It provides the background and the facts about fulfilment of needs and the protection of human rights of people with mental illnesses. The wealth of information that it provides and the clarity of its presentation make it a document of immediate practical usefulness to all those trying to help people with mental illnesses and those who look after them. At the same time, however, the sincerity and vigour of its text make it clear that this book is a personal statement of commitment to the achievement of equity for all people, with or without mental illnesses. "I hope that Inequity and Madness will be widely read and share the hope - which was clearly on Professor GuimA3n's mind when he undertook to produce this volume - that this book will contribute to improving the quality of life of those with mental illnesses and those who help them to live through times of devastating diseases and misery that is often an unnecessary consequence." Professor Norman Sartorius - From the Foreword.

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative. " -H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1946) Doctors are trained to treat people suffering from various diseases. This is the main form of their activity and usually the reason for which they selected medicine as their profession. The notion that they should become managers and engage in activi ties such as programming, calculating cost, assessing cost-benefit ratios, and thinking about pricing in accordance with the social utility of their intervention, is both foreign and abhorrent to them. They are sometimes willing to say how much they need in order to have a well-functioning service: usually they prefer to state what specific apparatus and other things they require without specifying the price of their demand. They can be persuaded to add a price tag to what they think is necessary for their work: but that was about as far as they would go, until recently. The growing emphasis on human rights over the past few decades, the greater emphasis on quality of life and the public's heightened expectations about their health led, in many industrialized countries, to a greater demand for health services. This, com bined with improved possibilities of diagnosis and treatment (at higher cost ), led to a significant increase in financial demands which made governments and health-care systems uneasy and ready to accept any solution that would stop the spiral of seem ingly endless cost augmentation."

During discussion of psychoanalysis and virtual reality in the new millennium, it was predicted that in the next century the differences between the conscious, unconscious, and the pre-conscious will have to be reconsidered in view of the ever-expanding concepts created by virtual reality. There will be virtual sexual acts over the Internet, ovum parthenogenesis will be possible without the intervention of the male, and clonic reproduction of the human being will be carried out in the laboratory. The child born in these circumstances will relate to a widening array of potential parental figures: the classic heterosexual couple, the single-parent family, the homosexual couple, the transsexual figure, etc. All this will of course alter the classic Oedipal constellation and without doubt the gender identity of the child. There will be attempts to undergo psychoanalysis via the Internet in the same way that other kinds of psychotherapy are being virtualized. But this will force us to redefine transference. On the other hand, it seems likely that psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic tool will, in the 21st century, relate more to somatic, medical patients or to the `worried well' than to psychiatric patients. These brief considerations on the scope of our deliberations in some way explain the diversity of this book, but also justify its interest.

This book is the proceedings of an International Conference on Challenges of Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Psychoanalysis, Health and Psychosexuality in the Era of Virtual Reality, held 15-17 September, 2000, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Psychoanalysis has become a basic psychiatric science in very much the same way as the neurosciences or epidemiology. However, there is a certain present-day discrediting of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool stemming, to some extent, from the reluctance of psychoanalysts to submit their theories and practice to scientific scrutiny. However, as we see in this book, there is a certain movement in psychoanalysis to introduce reliable measures that would allow for a scientific evaluation of its results as a therapeutic device.

Although there are great variations in respect to the role ascribed to psychoanalytic techniques in different countries, a clear upsurge of interest is apparent nowadays.
During discussion of psychoanalysis and virtual reality in the new millennium, it was predicted that in the next century the differences between the conscious, unconscious, and the pre-conscious will have to be reconsidered in view of the ever-expanding concepts created by virtual reality. There will be virtual sexual acts over the Internet, ovum parthenogenesis will be possible without the intervention of the male, and clonic reproduction of the human being will be carried out in the laboratory. The child born in these circumstances will relate to a widening array of potential parental figures: the classic heterosexual couple, the single-parent family, the homosexual couple, the transsexual figure, etc. All this will of course alter the classicOedipal constellation and without doubt the gender identity of the child.

There will be attempts to undergo psychoanalysis via the Internet in the same way that other kinds of psychotherapy are being virtualized. But this will force us to redefine transference. On the other hand, it seems likely that psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic tool will, in the 21st century, relate more to somatic, medical patients or to the worried well' than to psychiatric patients. These brief considerations on the scope of our deliberations in some way explain the diversity of this book, but also justify its interest.

We have developed eclectic "Intensive Dynamic Brief Group Therapy'' programs over the last 37 years in a dozen different care units (short-stay units in general hospitals, crisis centers and day units) in Spain and in Switzerland with an orientation toward the so called "Therapeutic Communities." In the last 20 years, the programs have become less psychodynamic and less democratic -somewhat ''decaffeinated, '' in fact. This, however, does not mean they are less efficient as this book tries to demonstrate. On the other hand, our experience over the years has shown the negative effects of the "caffeine" administered by certain lines of psychoanalytic action and ''pseudo-democratic'' environments. Nowadays, when the leadership of the institutions changes, the programs very likely loose their freshness in favor of more traditional biological interventions. This is why this has been very important to maintain the group training programs we organize for the personnel. They constitute a kind of ''Didactic communities', assuring in the maintenance of the therapeutic ideology among the professionals.

In this study, different dynamic psychotherapies are evaluated as applied to borderline personality disorder in clinical psychiatric settings in Bilbao and Geneva. The therapies were conducted in emergency, outpatient, and day units by teams of professionals in intensive, short-term integration programs. The results obtained, both from a clinical point of view as well as in relation to social adaptation, satisfied the medical authors who now communicate them and their efficacy to readers. "En este estudio se evaluan distintas psicoterapias dinamicas aplicadas al trastorno limite de la personalidad en ambientes clinicos psiquiatricos de Bilbao y Ginebra. Las terapias fueron llevadas a cabo en unidades de urgencias, ambulatorias y de dia por equipos multiprofesionales en programas integrativos intensivos de duracion breve. Los resultados obtenidos, tanto desde el punto de vista clinico como de la adaptacion social, fueron satisfactorios para los medicos autores quienes ahora los comunican y su eficacia al lector."

Proliferan hoy en Occidente las actividades corporales (yoga, danza, talleres de artes plasticas o de musica) ofertadas a personas de todas las edades por individuos o empresas frecuentemente no cualificadas, con la pretension de luchar contra la ansiedad, el "estres" o las dificultades vitales. Los Gobiernos de los distintos paises encuentran muchas dificultades para regular esas ofertas y los ciudadanos no cuentan con la informacion necesaria para distinguir entre lo que son terapias serias y mera supercheria. Este libro pretende describir y clasificar esas practicas, estudiar las bases biologicas y psicologicas sobre las que se asientan, describir someramente sus indicaciones y sus metodos y discutir sobre su eficacia. Adicionalmente, a lo largo del texto, intentaremos abordar algunas cuestiones especificas que se plantean con frecuencia cuando se habla de la relacion entre Arte y Psiquiatria.: Es cierto que para ser un artista creativo hay que tener un cierto grado de locura?. Cuales son los mecanismos psicologicos que se ponen en marcha en la genesis de una obra de Arte?. Cual es la relacion entre provocacion y el Arte moderno?."