Phototherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums (2nd Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book opened me up to a new world, where photos can be helpful in therapy - I am studying to be a counselor, and I also have a passion for photography. This book explains that using photos has nothing to do with beautiful pictures, but rather what has meaning for your clients in their therapy. It is a book that would be welcomed by all therapists.

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PhotoTherapy techniques use ordinary personal snapshots and family photos (and the feelings, memories, thoughts and information these evoke) as catalysts for therapeutic communication and personal healing, reaching areas inside a person that words alone cannot access."PhotoTherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums" is the most comprehensive introduction to the field of PhotoTherapy available.Emphasizing the "what", "why", and "how" of these practical techniques, this book is an excellent substitute for a training workshop! Written by psychologist, art therapist, consultant, trainer, and PhotoTherapy pioneer Judy Weiser, this book (now in second edition) explains and demonstrates each of the major techniques involved, and provides theoretical rationale from both psychology and art therapy contexts. It also includes many photo-illustrated client examples, case transcripts, and practical experiential "starter" exercises so that readers can immediately begin using these techniques in their own practice.This book is about photography as "personally-symbolic communication", rather than "art" -- exploring what a photograph is about emotionally, in addition to what shows on its surface visually. Thus these techniques require no previous experience with cameras or photographic art -- andthey can therefore be used successfully by therapists of all theoretical orientations, work settings, or client specializations. Often used as a text for university courses as well as for "Continuing Education" licensing credits for numerous mental health professions, this book is a "must" for not only therapists and counselors, but also anyone interested in family communication, diversity/cross-cultural work, conflict resolution, special education and other classroom applications, grief and bereavement counseling, coaching, community development, media/cultural studies, visual literacy, visual anthropology/sociology, research, and even scrapbooking! [*For more information, see: www.phototherapy-centre.com]*TABLE OF CONTENTS*: 1) Photographs as Therapeutic Tools2) The Five Techniques of PhotoTherapy 3) The Projective Process: Using Photographic Images to Explore Client Perceptions, Values, and Expectations4) Working with Self-Portraits: Understanding the Images Clients Make of Themselves5) Seeing Other Perspectives: Examining Photographs of Clients Taken by Others6) Metaphors of Self-Construction: Reflecting on Photographs Taken or Collected by Clients7) Photo-Systems: Reviewing Family Albums and Photo-Biographical Collections8) Using PhotoTherapy to Promote Healing and Personal Growth**AUTHOR BIO**: Founder and Director of the PhotoTherapy Centre in Vancouver, Canada, and former Editor of the Journal Phototherapy, Judy Weiser is a licensed Psychologist and registered Art Therapist who has focused her thirty-plus years of therapy practice on using PhotoTherapy techniques to help her clients heal.She currently consults, lectures, and gives training workshops world-wide, teaching people how to use these techniques to improve their therapy practice -- and their lives.

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Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine Review

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(More customer reviews)Dr. Ofri's first book of essays, "Singular Intimacies," was a soul-searching, thought-provoking self-portrait of becoming a doctor at a busy, inner-city hospital, New York's Bellevue. Ofri is still at Bellevue as an attending physician and editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.
This second reflective and graceful book of essays ranges over her experiences since - from far-flung temp positions during a post-qualifying travel break to her own rude awakening as a patient during her first pregnancy. But the bulk of the book revolves around Bellevue; the month-long rotations on hospital wards and the ongoing clinic practice which is her base. In the hospital rotations her interaction with a patient is intense, but finite. She prefers the clinic where the people are less sick, but the relationship is ongoing.
The book opens with Ofri's first experience as a patient dismayed by a busy doctor's delivery of fear-inducing news, the intimidation inherent in the relationship, and the medical professional's casual use of jolting jargon, like "high risk." In one of the last essays, she delivers her baby and discovers the reality of being an ordinary patient:
"I had no idea how much shame and humiliation are part of the experience: from the horrid gowns that never cover enough, to the exposure of some of the most private and embarrassing bodily functions, to the smells and sights which one is forced to wallow in, to the helplessness and inability to assert one's control." Ofri does get to exert control though, when eventually she succumbs to the temptation to throw her weight around - "I am an attending physician on faculty here" - and service improves dramatically.
She describes an ordinary chaotic day in the clinic, capped with anguish when she discovers an elderly Chinese man has a brain tumor and the language barrier prevents her from offering comfort or even information. There's lots of that - the problems of communicating in a place that encompasses so many immigrants. Communications problems do not always stem only from the lack of language interpreters, but also from cultural gulfs.
Ofri is no saint and she's often driven to the edge by frustration - too little time, too many demands, unsympathetic patients. One woman, always accompanied by her young daughter as translator, is a non-compliant, depressed hypochondriac whose arrival fills Ofri with teeth-gritting dread. Until a simple query from the daughter opens her eyes to the real pain that reverberates through the woman's family.
Ofri's treatments often stray outside medical boundaries. She negotiates ways for immigrant children to stay in school rather than accompany non-English speaking parents to the clinic; tutors a boy for the SAT test because her best recommendation for his long-term health was "to take the SAT and get into college."
Issues of poverty, helplessness, dignity and medical ethics dominate. A number of essays deal with terminal issues, two at length. In the first, "Living Will," a man with numerous debilitating health issues stops taking essential medication and lands in the emergency room. Once there, he allows emergency personnel to bypass his living will and ventilate him. This is either a panicky instinct from a man who can't breathe or the spark of a will to live. Like most doctors, Ofri decides the man really wants to live and helps to treat his depression and equip him with a modicum of dignity and usefulness.
The second essay is a bit more invasive. Elderly Mrs. Binet, also with multiple problems, decides to quit dialysis, in effect announcing her will to die. The resident in charge accepts this decision as does Ofri initially, but then she has second thoughts. What terminal illness does the woman have? None. Her life is a misery of pain, pills, procedures and complications, but she is not terminal. Ofri visits the woman and gently but insistently persuades her to postpone death while the doctors work harder on her pain problems. Although the case ends with Mrs. Binet going to the nursing home she so wanted to avoid, Ofri recalls the pleasure she took in eating a meal. Whether she did Mrs. Binet any favors is something with which the reader may quibble.
Ofri is compassionate and painstakingly moral. She is keenly aware of how the structure of her job distances her and insulates her from the poverty, cultural differences, fears and illness of her patients. She takes to heart the lessons they have to teach her, and works to remember that the very fact of illness is a handicap, and the position of being a patient is a disadvantage.
Ofri's intimate, anecdotal prose conveys wonder, humility and pride. For the duration of each essay her struggles are ours and - most of the time - the reader will applaud her judgment. Ofri's books contribute greatly to a dialogue on the doctor-patient relationship that only grows more urgent and difficult as medical treatments advance and doctors grown more specialized.
Portsmouth Herald

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The Poetry of Nursing: Poems and Commentaries of Leading Nurse-Poets (Literature and Medicine) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book approaches nurses' writing from a new angle. Not only are the nurses' poems presented, but alongside each poem is a commentary on the circumstances of the writing of the poem: in other words, the poetic process behind the finished product. It's a mistake to label these writers "nurse-poets," suggesting that they are somehow separate from "poets." They are poets who are also working as nurses, just as there are poets who are working as butchers and teachers and undertakers and housewives. The poets' commentaries in this collection reveal hints and information about the process of writing that will be valuable to all writers, not only those who happen to be nurses. Some readers may fear that "nurses' poetry" might be either too sweet or too grim. But this is a collection of human poetry, good poetry, poetry that stays in the mind and the heart.

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A gathering of nurse's voices"The fourteen major nurse poets here, born in different geographical locations and with different clinical backgrounds, have been poets since childhood. They all carry journals or bits of paper in their pockets, always ready to have-a-say about what they witness in their work or in their private lives. . . .We pass the baton, shift to shift and generation to generation. I pass the baton to the poets here and to all the others represented by this band of bards."-- from the IntroductionSo much written about literature and medicine has been from the perspective of physicians. But in the last few years nurses have found their voices and are making important contributions to the field of biomedical and nursing humanities. These men and women professionals see different things and experience patients and health care issues in different contexts.Judy Schaefer has compiled this anthology of contemporary nurse-poets' work, which is accompanied by their commentaries about their poetry, their work, and their lives. She has gathered contributions from some of the best-known nurse-poets as well as from those who deserve to be. The Poetry of Nursing will add significantly to the ever-growing body of literature that connects medicine, nursing, and the humanities.

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Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process Review

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(More customer reviews)This review is written by Paul R. Fleischman, MD.
Poets on Prozac compiled and edited by my friend and colleague, Dr. Richard Berlin, will be of great interest to psychotherapists interested in creativity, to poets and artists, and to anyone interested in the centuries long discussion of the relationship between madness and poetry. No one is more competent than Dr. Berlin to have compiled this book, as Dr. Berlin is a well published psychiatrist and poet.
One of the strengths of this book is that it is a collection of first-person narratives written by professional writers. This not only gives it compelling force of confession, but it also helps the poets speak freely outside of the confines of scientific imposition, questionnaires or tests. The editor's excellence has been in creating a dialogical atmosphere in which his subjects and fellow investigators feel they can write with remarkable freedom. This is a book of science and courage.
Dr. Berlin provides a thought-provoking Introduction in which he discusses the relationship between psychiatric disorders and poetic creativity. Avoiding any rigid conclusions, he nevertheless points to the recurrent theme that emerges in the rest of the book. Poets who have psychiatric disorders generally benefit from psychiatric treatment. Psychiatric treatments are generally effective. Most of the poets who write chapters for this book became more creative after successful treatment. Treatment does not reduce poetic creativity and may well augment it. All of this does not answer the question about whether this group of poets would have been equally creative if they had had not psychiatric disorders in the first place. Is it the absence of psychiatric disorder, or is it good treatment of preexisting psychiatric disorder, that is the most fertile ground for creativity?
This book makes us all feel befriended and hopeful in our personal turmoil and suffering, and in our will to create.
A full length review of Poets on Prozac has been posted by Cortney Davis online on The Literature, Arts, and Medicine database. Dr. Berlin has been interviewed about his book at the site called Treatment on Line.

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