TEACCH (Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication-handicapped Children) has grown over the past three decades from a small clinic for children to an internationally recognized treatment and support modality for individuals of all ages with autism spectrum disorders. In The TEACCH Approach to Autism Spectrum Disorders, the program’s founders and their colleagues explain its methods and philosophy based on an understanding and respect for "the culture of autism." The TEACCH program focuses on persons with autism and the development of instruction and supports based on each individual’s skills, interests, and needs. It draws from the research literature in psychology and neuropsychology to create activities and environments that are organized to emphasize meaningfulness—an approach that has proved crucial to an autistic individual’s ability to learn, comprehend, and apply learning across situations. The TEACCH Approach to Autism Spectrum Disorders explains how: - TEACCH targets critical areas in executive functioning, engagement, communication, and social skills. - Strategies can be tailored to an individual’s unique developmental and functional level. - Parents become involved in all phases of intervention as collaborators, cotherapists, and advocates. - The program can be introduced and adapted for individuals of all ages, from preschool children to adults. - Professionals can be trained in the program and its methods. This progressive program offers individuals with autism, their families, teachers, and therapists both optimism and useful strategies, without minimizing the condition or its effects. All clinicians working with people with autism will find The TEACCH Approach to Autistic Spectrum Disorders a valuable resource.

The books discusses law, psychiatry, and morality.

In this seminal work, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”

Thomas Szasz has been challenging the very existence of "mental illness" for over twenty-five years. His advocacy of freedom of choice and the abolition of involuntary psychiatry has made him America's most controversial psychiatrist. The Therapeutic State is a unique collection of topical essays about what the author calls "one of the grandest illusions of our age, mental illness, and the quixotic crusade against it." Pivoting his analysis on news-making events, Szasz exposes the fallacies of our present penchant for interpreting the behavior of "sane" persons as goal-directed and therefore sensible, and the behavior of "insane" persons as caused by a "mental illness" and therefore senseless. In a series of diverse short pieces, originally published in newspapers and magazines, the author shows us that individual liberty and responsibility are indivisible, and that we cannot protect ourselves against coercive psychiatry's threats to liberty so long as we persist in using psychiatric ideas and interventions to evade responsibility. Szasz's recommendation is simple but radical: So-called mental patients should be treated like other people - as no more subject to loss of liberty or entitled to excuses from responsibility than anyone else. Psychiatrists should be treated like other professionals - having no more power to inculpate innocent persons or to expurgate guilty ones than, say, accountants or architects. In short, our aim should be to disarm psychiatrists, much as the Founding Fathers disarmed priests. Nothing less can free us from the "benefits" and "harms" of the Therapeutic State.

With all the intrigue and twists of a mystery, Questions for Freud uncovers the paradoxes that riddle psychoanalysis today and traces them to Freud's vacillation at key points in his work--and from there to a traumatic event in Freud's life. What role did censored family history play in shaping Freud's psychological inquiries, promoting and impeding them by turns? With this question in mind, Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok develop a new biographical and conceptual approach to psychoanalysis, one that outlines Freud's contradictory theories of mental functioning against the backdrop of his permanent lack of insight into crucial and traumatic aspects of his immediate family's life. Taking us through previously unpublished documents and Freud's dreams, his clinical work and institutional organization, the authors show how a shameful event in 1865 that shook Freud and his family can help explain the internal clashes that later beset his work--on the origins of neurosis, reality, trauma, fantasy, sexual repression, the psychoanalytic study of literature, and dream interpretation. Steeped in the history, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis, this book offers a guide to the wary, a way of understanding the flaws and contradictions of Freud's thought without losing sight of its significance. This book will alter the terms of the current debate about the standing of psychoanalysis and Freud.

In recalling the process of helping patients ferret out the past from the deep recesses of their minds, To Wrestle with Demons offers a rare glimpse of a psychiatrist's innermost thoughts about how his work affects patients, deeply moves him, and reflects the society in which we live.

Book by Ellis, A.

Volumes have been dedicated to madness, but sanity is rarely mentioned. We can define the mad, but how do we classify the sane? In Going Sane, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delves deep into history, philosophy, literature and his own experiences to address questions that we rarely ask about ourselves, taking us on an engrossing journey in which we learn many things - including some of what it takes to be happy in the modern world.

For more than half a century, Thomas Szasz has devoted much of his career to a radical critique of psychiatry. His latest work, Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, is a culmination of his life’s work: to portray the integral role of deception in the history and practice of psychiatry. Szasz argues that the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness stands in the same relationship to the diagnosis and treatment of bodily illness that the forgery of a painting does to the original masterpiece. Art historians and the legal system seek to distinguish forgeries from originals. Those concerned with medicine, on the other hand—physicians, patients, politicians, health insurance providers, and legal professionals—take the opposite stance when faced with the challenge of distinguishing everyday problems in living from bodily diseases, systematically authenticating nondiseases as diseases. The boundary between disease and nondisease—genuine and imitation, truth and falsehood—thus becomes arbitrary and uncertain. There is neither glory nor profit in correctly demarcating what counts as medical illness and medical healing from what does not. Individuals and families wishing to protect themselves from medically and politically authenticated charlatanry are left to their own intellectual and moral resources to make critical decisions about human dilemmas miscategorized as “mental diseases” and about medicalized responses misidentified as “psychiatric treatments.” Delivering his sophisticated analysis in lucid prose and with a sharp wit, Szasz continues to engage and challenge readers of all backgrounds.

This interpretation of the way female sexuality was viewed by the nineteenth-century European medical profession characterizes an attitude based on massive ignorance and prejudice

"More than fifty years ago, Thomas Szasz showed that the concept of mental illness - a disease of the mind - is an oxymoron, a metaphor, a myth. Disease, in the medical sense, affects only the body. He also demonstrated that civil commitment and the insanity defense, the paradigmatic practices of psychiatry, are incompatible with the political values of personal responsibility and individual liberty. The psychiatric establishment's rejection of Szasz's critique posed no danger to his work: its defense of coercions and excuses as "therapy" supported his argument regarding the metaphorical nature of mental illness and the transparent immorality of brutal psychiatric control masquerading as humane medical care." "In the late 1960s, the launching of the so-called antipsychiatry movement vitiated Szasz's effort to present a precisely formulated conceptual and political critique of the medical identity of psychiatry. Led by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the antipsychiatrists used the term to attract attention to themselves and to deflect attention from what they did, which included coercions and excuses based on psychiatric principles and power." "For this reason, Szasz rejected, and continues to reject, psychiatry and antipsychiatry with equal vigor. Subsuming his work under the rubric of antipsychiatry betrays and negates it just as surely and effectively as subsuming it under the rubric of psychiatry. In Antipsychiatry: Quackery Squared, Szasz argues that his writings belong to neither psychiatry nor antipsychiatry, They stem from conceptual analysis, social-political criticism, and common sense."--BOOK JACKET

Conceptual Issues in Psychological Medicine is a collection of papers written by the celebrated psychiatrist, Michael Shepherd, who was one of the originators of psychiatric epidemiology in the UK and a leading social psychiatrist of his generation. He designed and implemented some of the first systematic studies into what are now widely recognised clinical syndromes. His extensive research experience and his advocacy of a scientific approach to social psychiatry form the basis of the essays contained in this book. Covering such issues as the development of research strategy and the difficulties involved in completing psychiatric studies, Shepherd's papers address many of the issues currently facing professionals in this field. He writes authoritatively and engagingly on clinical syndromes, the history of ideas and the use of the epidemiological approach in psychiatry. Conceptual Issues in Psychological Medicine stimulates and informs the reader in equal measure; it will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any practitioner of medicine.

Almost everyone has been touched by at least a mild form of depression, and thus has some sense of what severe depressive illness must be like. In addition to the most serious clinical cases which can lead to institutionalization or even suicide, this book explores the "normal" depression we all experience--the inevitable blues that accompany troubled personal relationships, career setbacks, or the death of a loved one. It provides a compelling treatment of questions about the nature of depression, where it comes from, who's at risk, and what it indicates about human experience. Depression is a highly prevalent health problem, affecting about 11 million Americans every year. Its costs are staggering - $43.7 billion annually in lost productivity, lost income, and increased health care costs. These numbers put depression on a par with heart disease as one of the most expensive diseases in the United States today. But, unlike heart disease, depression is widely misunderstood. About two-thirds of the cases of depression go undiagnosed and untreated. With a compelling mix of information, illustration, and interpretation, David B. Cohen explores the current state of knowledge about depression, including the powerful influence of genetics. In addition to depressive illness, the book deals with related ideas and topics such as mourning, mania, the rhythms of sleep, self concepts, and suicide. Insights from psychology and psychiatry are blended with history, literature, current events, and personal observation, and topped off with a dose of common sense.

Divided Staffs, Divided Selves offers a case-centered approach to the teaching of health care ethics to a wide range of students and clinicians. The book provides both clinical case material and a method for engaging in a dialogue regarding difficult decisions in the mental health care field that have potentially tragic choices. The essays that introduce the volume place the ethical problems of treating mentally ill people in the context of the health care ethics movement and traditions of ethical decision making. The individual cases are real, derived from actual clinical and consultative experiences.

Attempts to explain the many perplexing phenomena of marriages and marital therapy. Shaped by the philosophical conceptions of the inevitable existential limitations of all people, this text describes how each couple creates a unique system of interaction with each another.

The precise relationship between high-functioning autism and Asperger Syndrome is still a subject of debate. This volume provides a general overview of the disorder and present diverse opinions on diagnosis and assessment, neuropsychological issues, treatment, and related conditions. A special section features personal essays by individuals diagnosed with autism or Asperger Syndrome. The result is a comprehensive and useful survey of the current state of the field that will be of great interest to clinicians, teachers, researchers, and parents.