With the publication of this book psychotherapy finally arrives at the mainstream of mental health practice. This volume is an essential companion for every practising psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, psychotherapy counsellor, mental health nurse, psychotherapist, and mental healthpractitioner. It is integrative in spirit, with chapters written by an international panel of experts who combine theory and research with practical treatment guidelines and illustrative case examples to produce an invaluable book.Part One gives a comprehensive account of all the major psychotherapeutic approaches. Parts Two and Three systematically describe psychotherapeutic approaches to the major psychiatric disorders and personality disorders. Many chapters are multi-authored and describe the psychodynamic, cognitivebehavioural and other approaches for treating these illnesses. Part Four examines applications and modifications of psychotherapy across the lifecycle. Part Five describes psychotherapy with specific populations such as medical patients and those where gender is an issue, and finally Part Sixtackles some of the special topics of concern to psychotherapists including ethics, legal issues, and psychotherapy and neuroscience. The first of its kind, this is a 'must have' volume for all trainee and practising psychological therapists, whatever their background - psychiatry, psychology,social work, or nursing.

Presents case studies and applies the techniques of family therapy to the treatment of self-starvation, anorexia nervosa, as well as other psychosomatic diseases.

Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning focuses on Dr. Frankl's crucial findings that illustrate our sometimes unconscious desire to get hold of an ultimate meaning of life - whether it comes from a religious source or other venue of inspiration or influence. This is a very relevant topic, especially in light of that pervasive feeling of meaninglessness undercutting the ideas and ambitions of contemporary society. Whether it is the adolescent suffering from insecurity and doubt or the elderly person fearing isolation and neglect, a desperate sense of hopelessness and vulnerability plagues our culture. Dr. Frankl brilliantly demonstrates that it is possible for mankind to find, and actualize, profound meaning in his or her daily life. In this context, Frankl speaks of a "will to meaning" as a central motivating force, and presents specific evidence that life can offer meaning in each and every situation. For even those who have to shoulder the burden of personal guilt, or to face the force of inescapable suffering, still have, in principle, a unique opportunity to turn a predicament into an achievement - in other words, to turn personal tragedy into human triumph. Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning confesses that this search for meaning can also lead to nefarious ends such as unhealthy nationalism, obsessive jealousies, ethnic hatred, or a compulsive work ethic. Dr. Frankl believes that tolerance and a realization of our infinite possibilities throughout our finite existence will ensure a path to a fulfilling existence.

Psychiatric, or psychosocial, palliative care has transformed palliative medicine. Palliation that neglects psychosocial dimensions of patient and family experience fails to meet contemporary standards of comprehensive palliative care. While a focus on somatic issues has sometimes overshadowed attention to psychological, existential, and spiritual end-of-life challenges, the past decade has seen an all encompassing, multi-disciplinary approach to care for the dying take hold. Written by internationally known psychiatry and palliative care experts, the Handbook of Psychiatry in Palliative Medicine is an essential reference for all providers of palliative care, including psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health counselors, oncologists, hospice workers, and social workers.

In this classic work, internationally known Viennese psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, founder of the school of logotherapy, sets forth the principles of existential psychiatry. He holds that man's search for meaning in existence is a primary facet of his being; if the search is unrequited, it leads to neurosis. The role of the therapist, then, is to help the patient discover a purposefulness in life.

Through fascinating case histories and revealing encounters with patients, Dr. Peter Kramer, author of the international bestseller Listening to Prozac , provides a compassionate, immensely eloquent view of how psychiatry really works. Dr. Kramer was recently asked to guest host The Infinite Mind , a weekly public radio show focusing on the art and science of the human mind and spirit, behavior, and mental health. Listen to the show now.

"Help! I need somebody--but is it a guru or a shrink?" In response to this dilemma, the philosopher Jacob Needleman arranged a lecture series at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, in the hope of clarifying both the distinctions and the interrelations between these two paths of self-knowledge, psychotherapy and the ancient spiritual disciplines. This book is the enriching and often electrifying result. The eight lecturers--psychotherapists interested in the further reaches of self-development and spiritual teachers concerned with helping people live--dispatch the basic question with little ultimate disagreement. The consensus, most concisely expressed by British therapist A. C. Robin Skynner, is that therapy and the sacred traditions lead in quite different, one might say perpendicular, directions: therapy towards integration and functioning on the plane of normal daily life, spiritual discipline towards the far more difficult and demanding ascent into transcendence and self-evolution. But while the confusion of the two can be dangerous, properly understood they can assist and enhance each other." - Kirkus Reviews, 10/15/76.

"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

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 distinguished Austrian psychiatrist examines the essential reality and significance of mankind's unconscious spirituality and awareness of the God within and the interrelationship between psychotherapy and theology.