Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Review

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(More customer reviews)As a psychotherapist for 30 years and a mindfulness practitioner for nearly 10 years, I have read a lot of good books and articles on both subjects. "Mindfulness and Psychotherapy" is as clear and helpful in both disiplines as any I have encounted. The editors have done a 'mindful' job in selecting from an array of perspectives. Mindfulness is defined and contextualized for our western psychotherapeutic practice, while also placed in an historical and cultural framwork that informs and enlightens our understanding. Indeed the more philosophical essays are perhaps the strongest pieces in this marvelous compendium. We are reminded that the Buddah saw himself as a physician who sought to diagnose and find a cure for human suffering. Out of his own intimate encounter with suffering, he devised and revised a program that we in western psychological science are just now testing and finding curative-both for our clients and for ourselves.
There is much here to be considered by all schools of psychotherapy. Paul Fulton presents an intriguing chapter on Mindfulness as Clinical Training. There are concise chapters on teaching mindfulness skills to clients (even children)with varying disorders, including panic,anxiety, depression, and psychophysiological problems. There is a comprehensive while managable 'Resources for the Clinician" appendix.
Andrew Olendzki deserves special mention for his piece on "The Roots of Mindfulness." I had to stop highlighting as each page was yellowed with brightness.
If you are a psychotherapist, a meditator, or thinking of practicing either, you will do well to read this wonderful book.

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Responding to growing interest among psychotherapists of all theoretical orientations, this practical book provides a comprehensive introduction to mindfulness and its clinical applications. The authors, who have been practicing both mindfulness and psychotherapy for decades, present a range of clear-cut procedures for implementing mindfulness techniques and teaching them to patients experiencing depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and other problems. Also addressed are ways that mindfulness practices can increase acceptance and empathy in the therapeutic relationship. The book reviews the philosophical underpinnings of mindfulness and presents compelling empirical findings. User-friendly features include illustrative case examples, practice exercises, and resource listings.

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Handbook of Psychotherapy Integration Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the kind of text that people will likely want to hold onto and include in their personal library. This book is a good one to pick up for anyone who is either in training to become or is a therapist looking to continue their education in the area. The area of psychology seems to be moving in the direction of integration and this text help to provide an understanding of what exactly this is and how to achieve this with almost any area.

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This volume, originally published in 1992 by Basic Books, provides for the first time a comprehensive state-of-the-art description of therapeutic integration and its clinical practices by the leading proponents of the movement. After presenting the concepts, history, research, and belief structure of psychotherapy integration, the book considers two exemplars of theoretical integration, technical eclecticism, and common factors. The authors review integrative therapies for specific disorders, including anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder, along with integrative treatment modalities, such as combining individual and family therapy and integrating pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. The book concludes with a section on training and a look at future directions.

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The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals and Substance Abuse Counselors Review

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(More customer reviews)Shawn Shea's The Practical Art of Suicide Assessment: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals and Substance Abuse Counselors is one of the most valuable professional texts I have read in the past decade. The book combines scholarship, practical guidelines and a literary quality that renders it a truly exceptional book in the field. I found the case examples used to illustrate clinical problems invaluable; these vignettes bring the theoretical material "alive" in a way that encourages clinicians from various disciplines and theoretical orientations to meaningfully incorporate the concepts. Shea elucidates such critical issues as risk factors and risk predictors in such a way as to make constructs that are often reifed once again meaningful. As part of my professional responsibilities, I am responsible for training/teaching mental health emergency clinicians aspects of clinical interviewing and suicide assessment. I have incorporated many of the principles in this book into these trainings. The CASE approach to suicidal assessment is perhaps the best approach to this complex task that I have found. The discussion on "contracting for safety/no suicide contracts" is relevant, congruent with current ethical and legal principles, and reflects the difficult reality of working with suicidal patients. I regularly recommend both this book and Shea's book on psychiatric interviewing to participants in the workshops.
In summary, I highly recommend this text for clinicians from all disciplines and at all phases of professional development. It is a rich text, full of clinical wisdom and scholarship, that both the novice and the seasoned clinician will find themselves reaching for repeatedly. Perhaps the best assessment of the book is the fact that I've tried to keep it on my bookshelf, but it keeps getting borrowed by my colleagues. I've resolved the problem by keeping a separate copy at home. THAT constitutes a valuable book!

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Penned with a compelling elegance and charm, the "Practical Art of Suicide Assessment" is brimming with clinical wisdom, enlightening case illustrations and a vibrant sense of compassion. Viewed as one of the classics in the field of mental health, and acclaimed by both beginning students and experienced clinicians alike, it describes in a step-by-step fashion exactly how to make a sound suicide assessment. Dr. Shea explores the causes of suicidal ideation as well as the nuances of risk actors, protective factors, and the complexities of the clinical formulation of risk. He skillfully integrates all of this information for the reader by using real-life case examples and addressing daunting clinical challenges head-on such as assessing suicide risk with clients coping with borderline personality disorder or psychotic process.In addition Dr. Shea brings to life the highly acclaimed interview strategy for uncovering suicidal ideation, planning, behavior and intent the "Chronological Assessment of Suicide Events (CASE Approach)". Dr. Shea, the originator of the CASE Approach, shows exactly how to creatively and flexibly use its innovative interviewing techniques to match the unique needs of every client. The CASE Approach has been described by the noted suicidologist and past President of the American Association of Suicidology, David Jobes, Ph.D. as follows: "The CASE Approach moves the clinician almost imperceptibly into the secret internal workings of the mind and soul of the patient tormented by suicidal ideation. I believe that the CASE Approach is a remarkable conceptual and clinical contribution to the field of suicidology. It should be taught to any front-line clinician. It has the power to meaningfully save lives." Dr. Shea concludes the book with a no-nonsense approach to documenting a suicide risk assessment that can both help to save a client's life as well as keep the clinician out of court. Respected across the globe, the Practical Art of Suicide Assessment has been translated into languages as diverse as French and Japanese. Mental Health Presses is pleased to re-issue this classic in contemporary suicide prevention (originally published in 2002).

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The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief Review

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(More customer reviews)After a lifetime studying epilepsy and other neurological disorders, Michael Trimble has taken his considerable experience and used it as a means to explore how we become poets, prophets, or madmen (or all of the above). Those interested in the work of Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio, and V.S. Ramachandran will welcome this highly interesting volume. Trimble is Professor of Behavioral Neurology at the Institute of Neurology, University of London. His work has concentrated on the study of epilepsy but he has also edited an excellent and comprehensive volume entitled Biological Psychiatry (1996). His understanding of broad issues in neuropsychiatry is second to none. But what distinguishes The Soul in the Brain from Trimble's previous work is its focus on topics important to all of us. As he writes "The main theme of this book is the cerebral representations of emotional experiences that relate to music and religion and associated activities such as poetry" (53).
Trimble does a superb job reviewing loads of material and highlighting those pieces most relevant to the issues at hand. Here is a neurologist with a longstanding and passionate commitment to understanding all things human. Trimble's expressed admiration of William James, Freud, and John Hughlings Jackson confirm his desire to bring the field variously entitled neuropsychiatry or behavioral neurology to bear upon vital aspects of human experience.
The Soul in the Brain reviews such varied topics as poetry and religiosity, music and madness. Trimble highlights the cerebral mechanisms that contribute to such aptitudes. He demonstrates a genuine appreciation for these topics and for the disciplines that have traditionally sought to understand them. Trimble is not militant in his scientism. Concerning religion, for instance, he writes "Profane man is a descendant of H. religiosus, and he cannot wipe out his own history" (19). Not by simplifying or reducing the phenomena at hand will we come to an understanding but through a systematic revelation of underlying mechanisms we can gain greater clarity.
Of particular interest is the consideration of the right cerebral hemisphere and its relation to language, a topic Trimble feels has been neglected in the past. While Broca's and Wernicke's areas (the main regions associated with language) are typically located in the left hemisphere, other critical aspects of language including our abilities to work with metaphor, prosody, and tone probably derive from the right hemisphere's special capabilities.
Trimble's writing is clear and competent with some literary flourishes occasioned, no doubt, by his regard for poetry. In my opinion, the volume could have used a bit more editing, it felt `uneven' in numerous places. Several times while reading The Soul in the Brain I wished Trimble would have abbreviated some material and elaborated elsewhere. Most importantly, I wish he had discussed the relationship between temporal lobe epilepsy and religion at even greater length. Trimble devoted a chapter to this topic but given his expertise and the number of times I came across his name while reading about temporal lobe epilepsy elsewhere I had hoped for an even lengthier analysis. Those specifically interested in temporal lobe epilepsy would do well to read this volume but ought to read Eve LaPlante's excellent book Seized (1993) also.
The scope of the book is vast and in spite of this ambitious scope Trimble manages to synthesize most of the material he relates. Without any grand unifying theories to help us adequately combine biological and social insights books, like this one, that attempt to bring together diverse fields necessarily feel a bit scattered. This is less an insufficiency than a demonstration of bold vision and the desire to bring together fields that have previously allowed themselves to pass like ships in the night.

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In this provocative study, Michael R. Trimble, M.D., tackles the interrelationship between brain function, language, art -- especially music and poetry -- and religion. By examining the breakdown of language in several neuropsychiatric disorders, neuroscientists have identified brain circuits that are involved with metaphor, poetry, music, and religious experiences. Drawing on this body of evidence, Trimble argues that religious experiences and beliefs are explicable biologically and relate to brain function, especially of the nondominant hemisphere.Inspired by the writings and reflections of his patients -- many of whom have epilepsy, psychosis, or affective disorders -- Trimble asks how the human species, so enamored of its own logic and critical facilities, has held from the dawn of civilization strong religious beliefs and a reverence for the arts. He explores topics such as the phenomena of hypergraphia and hyper-religiosity, how religious experiences and poetic expression are neurologically linked with our capacity to respond to music, and how neuropsychiatric disorders influence behaviors related to artistic expression and religiosity by disturbing brain function.With the sensitivity of a dedicated doctor and the curiosity of an accomplished scholar, Trimble offers an insightful analysis of how the study of people with paradigmatical neuropsychiatric conditions can be the cornerstone to unraveling some of the mysteries of the cerebral representations of our highest cultural experiences.

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The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius Review

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(More customer reviews)It is accurate to say that there has been more creative energy released in the last twenty-five years than any than the last twenty-five hundred. This is due not only to the number of people that are actually alive now, but also to the vast amount of knowledge that is readily available. Modern technology is responsible for the availability of this knowledge, and the technology itself was the result of human creativity and ingenuity. In addition, creative people can now communicate in ways they could not before, thanks to the rise of the Internet. Further, innovation has been strongly encouraged, not primarily by educational institutions and hierarchies, but by the business community. This is an interesting development, and one that shows every indication of continuing. The academy, which used to be considered a refugee camp for the creative mind, is no longer a place where one can pursue and develop original ideas without extreme difficulty.
In this highly interesting book, the author acknowledges that the environment is important in nurturing creativity, but she also wants to understand what mechanisms in the brain are responsible for it. An understanding of these mechanisms is extremely important, for it could point the way to better methods of enhancing creativity, either by using pharmaceuticals, with techniques from genetic engineering, or possibly with radical changes in the environment. The author is a neuroscientist, and not a philosopher, and so her analysis is based more on what is observed in the laboratory, and not mere speculations from the armchair. Her goal is to obtain a neuroscience of creativity, which considering the paucity of research in this area, is a goal that one hopes she (and other researchers) will succeed in reaching.
One of the first issues that the author addresses in the book is the relation (if any) between intelligence and creativity. Reviewing the history of the study between these two notions, and noting creative people have been equated with "geniuses", she concludes that, in general, one can conclude that a certain level of intelligence is needed to make original contributions, one needs another faculty of the brain in order to do so. It is not clear from this discussion whether she believes that this entails a modular view of the brain, i.e. one in which the brain consists of specialized modules for various tasks, one of these modules being for tasks requiring creativity.
The author is also careful to note that originality, creativity, or novelty are concepts that are dependent on the context in which ideas arise and in the perceived utility of these ideas. In this regard, she discusses the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who believed in the existence of "true creativity". As summarized by the author, Csikszentmihalyi held that creativity should be understood in terms of the relationship between a `domain', which is a particular area of knowledge; a `field' that is a collection of experts in the domain, and a `person' who actually introduces novel ideas into the domain under the auspices of the field. Motivated by these considerations, the author holds that creativity must involve originality, utility, and must lead to product of some kind. These requirements, at least on the surface, are reasonable, but there are difficulties that arise when one attempts to check them for a particular idea or concept. One issue that immediately arises in this regard is attempting to check whether indeed the concept or creation is indeed novel, or whether it was actually contained in prior ideas or creations. The issue of whether an idea was actually contained in prior ones comes up quite frequently in the field of automated mathematical discovery, which seeks to emulate, in a machine, human creative mathematical ability. Because of the deductive nature of mathematics, the progression of ideas must follow logically from those in prior ones, i.e. in the premises. But the "new" ideas must be different in some sense from the ones that they are logically derived from. It can be become very debatable whether these ideas were indeed original, or whether they were merely "contained in the premises."
The book would not be complete of course if the author did not discuss in detail her ideas on the neuroscience behind creativity. For the general reader, she includes some elementary discussion on brain anatomy as a warm-up. In her brief treatment of the functions of the brain she mentions the current debate as to the executive functions of the brain, i.e. whether there is a central "executive" in the brain that decides what changes are to occur. As an alternative to a central authority, the author mentions the view of the brain as being a `self-organizing' system. This is currently a popular view of the brain among physicists, and for the author it helps to explain what she calls "ordinary creativity." However, the author clearly believes that something else is needed to explain "extraordinary" creativity: unconscious processes such as the process of `free association.' The author refers to her experimental work on using neuroimaging technology to find out which areas of the brain are active during free association. Her work is also dependent on the notion of `episodic memory', which she characterizes as memory that is linked to the personal experiences of the individual. Her neuroimaging experiments indicated that the association cortex was active when the subject was engaging in random unconscious free association. She is careful to admit though that a lot more research is needed to find the neural basis behind extraordinary creativity, but her suspicion is that it involves making links between objects or concepts that were not linked before. These associative links "run wild" and create new connections, resulting in a disorganized mental state. This motivates her to study the connection between creativity and insanity, a topic that she also discusses at some length in the book, along with hints and exercises that individuals can use to enhance their creativity.

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Psychiatry (Oxford Medical Publications) Review

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(More customer reviews)For students of any mental health profession, this is an essential text. It is written, though, with practice in the U.K. predominantly in mind. Nevertheless, if you have ever come across Maurice Sainsbury's "Key to Psychiatry", found its approach direct, concise and waffle-free and longed for a more up-to-date text like it, this is it. It is linked throughout to the ICD-10 and DSM-IV (as every psychiatry text should!) The text doesn't spare a word, the language is rich and free of vague opinionating. Packed as it is with key facts and concise, clear explanations there is little room left for waxing lyrical! But if you like your text books to-the-point, with plenty of bullet-pointed tables elucidating concepts at-a-glance and set out under easy-to-find headings in bite-size chunks, this text does it without losing the rich detail needed. Get it!

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Psychiatry introduces medicine students to the subject in a concise, innovative and memorable way. Its patient-centred approach blends a discussion of the theoretical basis of different psychiatric disorders with an explanation of the management of these disorders in everyday clinical practice, using genuine case histories to place the content in a realistic context.Recognizing that having positive interactions with a patient is central to the provision of successful psychiatric care, the book includes guidance on history-taking and assessment, while also reflecting best practice as set out by current clinical guidelines.Having undergone an extensive revision for this fourth edition, and covering all the major psychiatric conditions in a logically-structured way, the book is an invaluable guide to all individuals who are likely to encounter those with psychiatric problems, including students of medicine, healthcare, and social work. Online Resource CentreThe Online Resource Centre to accompany Psychiatry features DT Figures and tables from the book in electronic formatDT Self-assessment materials for studentsDT Updates on the latest clinical guidelines

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Play Therapy Treatment Planning and Interventions: The Ecosystemic Model and Workbook (Practical Resources for the Mental Health Professional) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book beautifully facilitates the introduction of themes, into practice, that capture the emotional energy of a client in play. The book clearly provides a structure for the therapist to help the individual with the opening and closing of their emotional and psychological boundaries. In general, the techniques illustrate how the therapist is able to help the client more easily access the underlying boundary process and accept directed inputs, their way, that will help them transform poorly developed internal structures, (i.e. family of origin tapes), into healthier ones, (e.g. long held anger can be transformed into present day assertiveness). Overall, this book is a valuable launching tool for therapists considering Play Therapy as an intervention.

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Play Therapy Treatment Planning and Interventions: The Ecosystemic Model and Workbook contains key information on one of the most rapidly developing and growing areas of therapy. The book is designed to help play therapists develop specific treatment goals and develop focused treatment plans, as now required by many regulating agencies and third party payers.The text includes descriptions of 25 actual play therapy activities. Any preparation the therapist may need to complete before the session is identified as is the outcome the therapist may expect. Each activity description ends with a suggestion as to how the therapists might follow up on the content and experience in future sessions. The activity descriptions are very practical and are geared to the child clients specific developmental level.Play Therapy Treatment Planning and Interventions presents guidelines for interviewing clients and their parents as well as pretreatment assessment. The book provides guidance on data gathering for the intake process and case conceptualization. Case examples and completed sections of the workbook, quotes, and lists increase the text's comprehension. The entire workbook is provided in text format and on disk. It provides the therapist with an easy-to-use format for recording critical case information, specific treatment goals, and the overall treatment plan. Key Features* Presents a comprehensive theory of play therapy and a comprehensive model of play therapy intervention* Clearly relates the theoretical model to the interventions* Provides examples of the application of both the theory and the intervention model to specific cases* Provides a structure by which the reader can apply the theory and intervention model to his or her own cases* Describes actual play therapy activities and identifies how therapists can prepare for the session, implement the activity, and the outcome they may expect* Describes play activities clustered according to the developmental level of the children to which they are best suited* Workbook format provides the reader with a method for obtaining comprehensive intake and assessment data, organizing that data into a case formulation and treatment goals, and then developing a comprehensive treatment plan* Provides a blank copy of the workbook, as well as the workbook on disk, for use in ones own practice

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Music, Language, and the Brain Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the best book so far on language, the brain, and music. It is highly technical, especially the first five chapters. Nonspecialists with a serious interest can get through the last two ("Meaning" and "Evolution") but the first five are hard going unless you are fairly advanced.
Patel reviews an enormous, and almost entirely very new, literature on similarities and differences at the micro level between language and music. Overall, music is clearly related to language in many ways, but equally clearly a separate realm--a different communicative modality.
He also points out that music and its meanings are learned. We are not born knowing that minor key is "sad"; that's a recent west-European idea, unknown to the rest of the universe. We have to learn about the pastorality of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, and so on. On the other hand, lullabyes sound like mothers shushing their babies, and I would add that laments in every culture sound like ordinary weeping. Still, most musical meanings appear to be culturally learned.
This is an excellent book, and I am duly impressed with all of it, but I do have some modest points to raise. First, I would find music and language somewhat closer than he does. He rules out of consideration a number of intermediate forms--chant, rhythmic speech (like African-American sermons), incantation, word-music poetry (like Russian romantic lyrics), children's play-games, and a great deal more. It seems that a huge percentage of human communication, including much of the most important religious material in every culture, is in that neglected border zone. Something very important is here and is being missed.
Second, he concludes language definitely evolved, but music is a rather recent invention--not an evolved part of communication. I am usually highly allergic to "genes as destiny," and this is surely the first time I ever argued for a genetic explanation against a learning-based one! But I can't separate music and language enough to see music as a recent invention. It depends on some of the same recursive hierarchic-nesting systems of planning as language does; it is universal among humans; it is deeply important; it seems a physical need for a lot of people. Of course I cannot be sure if this means there really is an evolved mechanism, and the question remains open.
Third, he rather misses the relevance of bird song. He is aware of, but strangely downplays, recent work showing that many (most?) songbirds learn their songs and use them to recognize their mates, neighbors, local dialect sharers, and so on. Birds also use song to keep in touch with their families, show their levels of health (as pointed out by Marlene Zuk), show their reproductive status, find each other, and much else. They also use song to communicate their mood states: level of arousal, type of arousal, and more. This is important, as will appear below.
Many songbirds are quite brilliant composers; mockingbirds and many others incorporate all sorts of learned noises into their songs, change the noises to fit their song patterns, work them into original phrases, and so on. Of course no bird comes close to composing even a simple song in the human sense (i.e. a single hierarchically-nested composition using phrases to carry out an overall plan). Bird song has mere "phrase structure grammar," to be technical; they don't do sentences. (No nonhuman animal is known to.) But they are doing something more than just marking territory and finding a mate. Actually, many of the best singers mate for life and don't need to find a mate in most years. Yet they and their mates often sing to each other. Also, many birds sing all year round, not just in the breeding season. We don't know what they are saying, but obviously a lot. Very simple calls do fine for territory-and-mating. Song is incredibly dangerous (hawks and cats home in on it) and expensive (it takes a lot of brain tissue, enough to be a real cost in flying). If the simple and humble songs of birds are this complex and demanding, human music must be a really major enterprise, far more important than social scientists have allowed till now. Bird songs are important because no nonhuman primates and very few other mammals are known to have complex learned songs. Bird songs are about our only models. (Whales sing too, but don't make great lab animals.)
I think music evolved, and did so to handle the management, manipulation, and communication of broad, general, but intense mood-states. Language handles the specific cognitive information; music handles the powerful but unsayable moods. Partly, the moods are directly represented in the music (as in lullabyes and laments); partly we learn our cultures' rules about communicating.
There is a great deal more to say about this, especially when one folds religious chants into the mix. We need more dialogue and better cross-cultural and cross-species knowledge. Is there a group out there working on this?

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In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers.Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms.Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines.This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award

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A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers Review

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(More customer reviews)I attended the 2005 Skeptics Society conference on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness at Caltech, where Ramachandran had been scheduled to speak but was unable to do so because of a family emergency. Although I was not previously familiar with his work, the description led me to believe he was a speaker I would be interested in hearing, and this book, which I purchased at the conference, provides a strong case for that. I've long had an interest in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and minored in cognitive science in my Ph.D. studies (never completed) at the University of Arizona. I've been out of academia for 11 years now, and apart from reading occasional works like Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves, I've not been keeping close tabs on the field. The conference and this book were quite a pleasure--it is clear that there have been some significant developments over the last decade.
It is hard to believe that there are still people who think the brain is little more than a radio receiver, a set of mechanical controls for a disembodied spirit to manipulate the body. Ramachandran's book--like the case studies of Oliver Sacks and A.N. Luria--shows how wrongheaded that view is.
This is a thin (112 pages of text, 45 pages of notes), very accessible and entertaining book. If you enjoy the works of Sacks and Luria, you are likely to enjoy this as well. This is not a collection of case studies, though there are some descriptions of particular patients--it is written from a higher elevation, bringing together recent results, explaining unusual phenomena, and speculating about how those phenomena may tie in to a further understanding of the details of the brain's function.
The book came from Ramachandran's BBC Reith lectures, so it is for a popular audience, with the notes providing some more underlying detail. There are five chapters, each dealing with a single topic. The first chapter is about amputees who experience pain in their "phantom limbs" and how the parts of the brain which had been devoted to the now-absent limbs can become mapped to still-present parts of the body which are handled by physically proximate parts of the brain. For example, a patient whose left arm had been amputated could feel contact to the nonexistent fingers of his left hand from touches to parts of his face or upper arm. Ramachandran then uses this remapping phenomenon to speculate about the causes of Capgras' syndrome (where a patient believes people he knows have been replaced withimpostors), synesthesia, and pain asymbolia, where a patient responds to pain stimulus with laughter.
The second chapter is about vision, and specifically about the phenomena of blindsight (where a person has no experience of seeing, but at an unconscious level does see), hemisphere neglect, and mirror agnosia. In this chapter Ramachandran discusses "mirror neurons," neurons found in monkeys which activate when a monkey performs some task, but also when the monkey sees another monkey perform the same task.
The third chapter, "The Artful Brain," is the most speculative, and provides Ramachandran's suggested ten "universal laws of art," which he offers as features we find aesthetically pleasing in art, and discusses some reasons why those features might be pleasing to the brain.
The fourth chapter deals in more detail with synesthesia, the perception of stimuli with multiple senses, such as experiencing colors corresponding with sounds or numbers. He links this to cross-activation of sites in the brain (similar to his discussion in the first chapter), points out some similar phenomena that most people share (such as a tendency to associate certain kinds of abstract shapes with certain sounds or names), and speculates that such associations may have paved the way for the evolution of language from non-verbal communication.
The fifth and final chapter is titled "Neuroscience--The New Philosophy." Ramachandran discusses how some of the phenomena of neuroscience might bear on questions from philosophy of mind about qualia, free will, and self-awareness. The chapter doesn't get very deep into any of these philosophical issues, but it's clear that more has been learned in the last few decades of neuroscience than in the last few millenia of philosophy.
I highly recommend this book as an introduction to these topics.

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A Working Life For People With Severe Mental Illness Review

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(More customer reviews)I work as a psychiatrist in an academic setting, and use this book frequently for teaching purposes and as a reference for residents and students. I used it extensively for Canadian psych boards preparation. It is especially valuable because it gives perspective to new research by giving the history of research papers that established for example the use of Lithium (on which little has been written since the 70s and 80s), it also describes very well psychosocial treatments for a wide variety of mental illnesses, much more clearly and exhaustively than in the Kaplan and Saddock, for instance. It also reads very well. Highly recommended

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Traditional approaches to vocational rehabilitation, such as skills training classes, job clubs, and sheltered employment, have not been successful in helping people with severe mental illness gain competitive employment. Supported employment, in which clients are placed in jobs and then trained by on-site coaches, is a radically new conceptual approach to vocational rehabilitation designed for people with developmental disabilities. The Individual Placement and Support (IPS) method utilizes the supported employment concept, but modifies it for use with the severely mentally ill. It is the only approach that has a strong empirical research base: rates of competitive employment are 40% or more in IPS programs, compared to 15% in traditional mental health programs. The third volume in the Innovations in Practice and Service Delivery with Vulnerable Populations series, this will be extremely useful to students in psychiatric rehabilitation programs and social work classes dealing with the severely mentally ill, as well as to practitioners in the field.

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How to Write and Illustrate a Scientific Paper Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been dipping into this concise and witty book as I write my 13th research paper. Gustavii provides excellent advice on the entire process, from preparing graphs (very helpful) to dealing with editors and referees. The book is aimed at graduate students and post-docs but the language is so simple and direct that undergraduate researchers could also learn from it.

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This second edition of How to Write and Illustrate a Scientific Paper will help both first-time writers and more experienced authors, in all biological and medical disciplines, to present their results effectively. Whilst retaining the easy-to-read and well-structured approach of the previous edition, it has been broadened to include comprehensive advice on writing compilation theses for doctoral degrees, and a detailed description of preparing case reports. Illustrations, particularly graphs, are discussed in detail, with poor examples redrawn for comparison. The reader is offered advice on how to present the paper, where and how to submit the manuscript, and finally, how to correct the proofs. Examples of both good and bad writing, selected from actual journal articles, illustrate the author's advice - which has been developed through his extensive teaching experience - in this accessible and informative guide.

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The Inner History of Devices Review

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(More customer reviews)Book Review submitted by: Stephen J. Hage, SteveH9697@aol.com
This is a book that invites you to reexamine not only what you think of every day devices and things like cell phones, personal computers, computer games and implanted defibrillators; it asks you reexamine how you think about them and why.
The approach is interesting in that uses ethnography, memoir and clinical cases in the form of essays written by individuals who've interacted with and, in some cases treated people who established relationships with devices most of us would never consider and not be able to see, even if we were to interact with those described in the essays.
One I found particularly thought provoking is entitled: The Internal Cardiac Defibrillator
An internal cardiac defibrillator is a device implanted in your chest and connected by wires to your heart. It constantly monitors your heartbeat and if your heart goes into cardiac fibrillation, which is life threatening, the device shocks you, much the same as depicted in scenes on medical shows like ER. But, instead of a doctor or EMT placing paddles on your chest, yelling "Clear" and pushing the button to shock you it happens automatically, inside your chest. The ICD shocks you and, when it does, the experience is as painful and traumatic as when it's done with paddles.
It's impossible to understand what it means to have an ICD implanted in your chest without talking to people who do have one. Here's an example:
"I died and then..." "This is the peculiar grammar of stories told by people with ICDs. The internal firing of the ICD is painful and brings one back from death, a repeated boundary crossing that writes a new narrative of life and death."
On one level, having an ICD is comforting because it's there, just in case you need it to save your life. But, there's also a dark side.
"My independence was gone. And yet, they say that this thing gives you more independence. Because you can be assured that you won't go into cardiac arrest and die when you take a trip and all that. My thing is, we take a trip, and I'm wondering, okay, I wonder which one of these exits is a hospital. Or, you know, something like that."
Darker still is the story of Stan who is forty-two and received an ICD when he passed out while running.
When he thinks back to that event, he realizes if he had died it would have been an easy death. "Like blacking out on the road, dying like that would be nothing. There would no pain whatsoever..."
Now that particular option is gone. Should he go into cardiac arrest the ICD will shock him back to life. On one occasion he received multiple shocks while swimming. He felt a funny feeling in his chest that made him stop. "And all of a sudden, wham, I got shocked--damn, I gotta get out of the pool." He was shocked about three times.
After the incident Stan asked his doctor how many times the ICD would shock him before it "would stop trying."
About nine times his doctor told him.
That kind of information is comforting, troubling and frightening, all at the same time.
Examples of other things explored in this book are a prosthetic eye, computer games, a dialysis machine and video poker.
I found this book to be like a bag of potato chips. Once you've read one essay you'll find it difficult to stop until you've read all of them.


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Psychiatric Diagnosis Review

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(More customer reviews)I love these authors. They explain psychiatric syndromes in a way that is very readable and easy to understand. I think this is a must for anyone who treats psychiatric patients.

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Updated throughout, this text provides a critical overview of the major psychiatric syndromes, with a minimum of theory and clinical judgment. Medical students and psychiatric residents should find it a useful guide to the field.

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Autism: The Facts (Oxford Medical Publications) Review

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(More customer reviews)An excellent and straightforward primer on the hows and whys of autism, written by two of the leading autism researchers. If you're new to the subject, then this overview is a good way to get up to speed.
I do have one complaint: [$] for a 113 page paperback is extortionate, plain and simple -- especially when it's largely being charged to the parents of disabled children. As a writer myself, I know that this is not the author's fault... it's the publisher. OUP, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Next edition, do the decent thing and drop it down to $...
Still, don't let this complaint put you off. If you have a family member or acquaintance who has recently been diagnosed with autism, don't hesitate: just buy it.

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Coping with a diagnosis of autism can be a troubling and confusing experience for parents. Ignorance of this bewildering disorder can provoke difficult decision-making for parents and physicians alike. What causes autism?What happens to children with autism when they grow up?Does autism run in families?What kind of educational setting is best? In this accessible, comprehensive book, the authors have discovered the questions on the minds of parents and professionals, and have attempted to answer them. Autism is a puzzling disorder. It begins in early childhood, and disrupts many aspects of development, leaving the child unable to form social relationships or communicate in the usual way.This fascinating book explains in a clear, straightforward manner what is known about the condition. Helpful appendices identify organizations and resource providers concerned with autism. Written first and foremost as a guide for parents, but required reading for interested professionals, it covers the recognition and diagnosis of autism, its biological and physiological causes, and the various treatments and educational techniques available.

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Demystifiying Anorexia Nervosa: An Optimistic Guide to Understanding and Healing Review

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(More customer reviews)This book offers lots of information, backed by both scientific sources and the author's personal experience as a physician. But what I appreciated most was the author's calm and reassuring tone. The book lives up to its subtitle, An Optimistic Guide to Understanding and Healing. Although Lucas describes admittedly alarming situations in detail, he does not sensationalize the disease. Instead he presents a very human side of both the victims and the loved ones (usually the parents).
I found that Demystifying Anorexia Nervosa is an excellent complement to Ellyn Satter's books about children's eating and the "division of responsibility" idea. Lucas, like Satter, place great importance on respecting the individual and the individual's desire to make decisions for him/herself. (For those who have not read Satter's books, they describe how to have the right feeding relationship with your child, and also offer excellent practical advice on feeding babies through school age children.)

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Emotionally and physically devastating, anorexia nervosa is the third most common chronic illness in teenage girls, striking one in every two hundred (boys only make up 10% of all cases). And while there are a plethora of books on the subject, most are either personal accounts of recovery or attempts to explain the disease from only one perspective, be it psychoanalytic, behavioral, cultural, or biological. Now, in this much-needed resource, Dr. Alexander Lucas draws on 40 years of experience, mostly at the Mayo Clinic, to offer clear guidance and authoritative advice on how to overcome anorexia nervosa. Based on his own unique research with thousands of patients, and striking a careful balance between psychological, cultural, and biological approaches, Dr. Lucas demystifies this seemingly irrational disease and guides parents through the harrowing process of recovery. The book defines anorexia, illustrates how it can evolve and how common it really is, and outlines every part of the treatment process, from the early warning signs that parents should watch out for, to the initial evaluation, to specific treatment plans. Dr. Lucas emphasizes the patient's role in defining the healing process, with the support of the family and medical team. Throughout the book, he counsels optimism, stressing that in spite of the destructive power of the disease, most who suffer from anorexia nervosa fully recover and are able to live normal, healthy, and productive lives.For anyone seeking level-headed, medically sound, and comprehensive guidance on the most effective treatments for this life-threatening disorder, Demystifying Anorexia Nervosa offers a wealth of reliable, reassuring information.

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Black Sun Review

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(More customer reviews)In much the same way that Philippe Aries took the subject of childhood and illuminated it for all time in "Centuries of Childhood," fellow French writer (although Bulgarian-born) and Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva examines depression and melancholia. She comes at it from various angles and filters: fine arts, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and of course psychology. She posits psychoanalysis as a (really THE) 'counterdepressant' -- convincingly. This is great highbrow stuff: chapters with titles like"Beauty, the Depressive's Other Realm," and "Life and Death of Speech." Death, suicide, the inevitable gloom resulting from loss of maternal, later erotic, love; all are insightfully discussed -- even rather tenderly. If you're depressed BLACK SUN won't make you more so -- and if you're feeling okay to begin with, it's a terrific scholarly study.

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InBlack Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval.Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated.

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Leadership is an Art Review

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On page one of Leadership Is an Art Max Depree writes, "The book is about the art of leadership: liberating people to do what is required of them in the most effective and humane way possible". This is a theme that runs throughout this very wise and in every way excellent work. The following quotes provide some of the flavor of Depree's enlightened and inspiring thinking:
*The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.
*In addition to all of the ratios and goals and parameters and bottom lines, it is fundamental that leaders endorse a concept of persons. This begins with an understanding of the diversity of people's gifts and talents and skills.
*Understanding and accepting diversity enables us to see that each of us is needed. It also enables us to begin to think about being abandoned to the strengths of others, of admitting that we cannot know or do everything.
*Leaders don't inflict pain; they bear pain.
*First, as a Christian I believe that each person is made in the image of God. For those of us who have received the gift of leadership from the people we lead, this belief has enormous implications.
*Leaders owe people space, space in the sense of freedom. Freedom in the sense of enabling our gifts to be exercised.
*Participative management is not democratic. Having a say differs from having a vote.
*Interestingly, though in organizations like ours we need a lot of freedom, there is no room for license. Discipline is what it takes to do the job.
*One of the important things leaders need to learn is to recognize the signals of impending deterioration.
*Without forgiveness, there can be no real freedom to act...
Depree has given us an abiding philosophy of leadership. Actually operating in alignment with these principles demands a very high level of integrity - one that few leaders ever do attain. Those that do so unleash forces of transformation resulting in high performance high involvement organizations.
This book characterizes a commercial arena filled with vocational potential. I give it the highest recommendation.


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