Book Reviews

Book offers personal stories about professional moments of failure. Fifteen psychotherapists define failure from their own perspective and courageously revisit client cases, some that occurred many years ago, to share intimate and revealing vignettes where the therapeutic bond was disrupted, where they were deeply wounded, and for some those wounds changed the course of their career. For all, these wounds remain as a tear in the fabric of their being.

With increased efforts to reduce stigma and approach mental health care from a more personalized perspective, Same Time Next Week comes at a critical moment in the transformation of psychotherapeutic practices from the clinical to a more humanized model. Offering an intimate look into a world that, until recently, has remained largely hidden behind closed doors and hushed tones, the eighteen stories comprising this anthology are deeply personal, rich and thorough in their narrative structures without the sterile feel of the traditional case study. In their exploration of a wide variety of mental illnesses including (but not limited to) depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, schizophrenia, and eating disorders, these stories are distinct in that many are written by mental health professionals who have, themselves, experienced mental illness and therefore have first-hand knowledge of the trials and tribulations of recovery.

Kamamalani hopes to create a ‘pregnant pause’ for conscious decision-making with a glimpse of the local and global implications.

We're pleased to share our Summer Book Review Issue, volume 6, number 2, 2016 with our loyal community members and passersby--folks visiting our blog...

With support from current empirical literature on exercise, Dr. Christina G. Hibbert makes a compelling argument for how and why exercise is medicinal for mental health. This knowledge is often not enough to motivate us to change, yet Dr. Hibbert works through the process of change with an array of exercises and reflection questions that ease even the most ambivalent reader into the process.

Toni Heineman shares the struggles of working with foster youth and how clinicians can begin to make a lasting difference in their lives. Her new book is filled with accounts of children's experiences with foster families, therapy, group homes, homelessness, and countless struggles of this population. She provides this beginner’s manual to build trusting relationships and hopefully mend trauma’s wounds as well as provide case workers, attorneys, and clinicians with tools to understand foster youth.

Did you know that thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency can lead to weakness, irritability and depression? That folate (vitamin B9) deficiency can result in depression, apathy, fatigue, poor sleep, and poor concentration? That people with chronic digestion problems are often anxious and depressed? And believe it or not, that pure maple syrup has the potential to prevent Alzheimer’s and other brain disease? Nutritional neuroscience is validating the reality that nutritional factors are intertwined with human cognition, behavior and emotions (Sathyanarayana, Asha, Ramesh, & Rao, 2008). In our current milieu of treating the ‘whole’ person— soma, psyche, and spirit—food has finally claimed its well deserved acclaim for its role in the development, management and prevention of our overall health and for specific mental health problems such as depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease (Sathyanarayana et al., 2008).

Embodied Being is an interweave of contemplation, Zen practice, and philosophy to inform the art of manual therapy (Rolfing in particular), with each thread representing a solid thread of Jeffrey Maitland’s internalized fabric.

Healing Body, Self and Soul is a statement of a therapeutic process Dr. Perlmutter developed by integrating Reichian character structures, psychoanalysis, touch, breath, awareness and more. ISP is an amalgam of numerous concepts and interventions (e.g., inner child work, expressive movement, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy) that focuses on bodily events and processes necessary to shape the client’s mind and soul in an oscillatory process moving from body experiences to verbal reflection in order to cognitively integrate “new awareness, new experience of the deeper self and to foster behavior that is congruent with the deeper self”

Gill Westland’s 2015 release entitled, Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy, merits mention. Her voice felt personable, reachable, while professional, informative. There’s something for anyone involved in mental health care as Gill draws on current findings from: infant development studies; neuroscience; various schools and approaches; and mindfulness/Buddhist practices.