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A lively exploration of mind and brain, conscious and unconscious, patient and client. In this companion volume to their widely acclaimed Perspectives of Psychiatry, Phillip R. Slavney, M.D., and Paul R. McHugh, M.D., argue that the discontinuity of brain and mind is the source of much of psychiatry’s discord, for it leads psychiatrists to think about their discipline in terms of polar opposites: conscious or unconscious; explanation or understanding; paternalism or autonomy. Psychiatric Polarities brings together the history of ideas and such clinical issues as suicide and bipolar disorder to identify, describe, and debate these and other polar oppositions that arise from psychiatry’s inherent ambiguity. There is no single conceptual perspective that is sufficient for all of psychiatry’s concerns, Slavney and McHugh observe, yet it is both possible and necessary to transcend the denominational conflicts that plague the field. In Psychiatric Polarities, their examination of these conflicts demonstrates how a methodological approach can help to resolve disagreements rooted in partisan commitments.
Substantially revised to include a wealth of new material, the second edition of this highly acclaimed work provides a concise, coherent introduction that brings structure to an increasingly fragmented and amorphous discipline. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney offer an approach that emphasizes psychiatry's unifying concepts while accommodating its diversity. Recognizing that there may never be a single, all-encompassing theory, the book distills psychiatric practice into four explanatory methods: diseases, dimensions of personality, goal-directed behaviors, and life stories. These perspectives, argue the authors, underlie the principles and practice of all psychiatry. With an understanding of these fundamental methods, readers will be equipped to organize and evaluate psychiatric information and to develop a confident approach to practice and research.
"This book provides a thoughtful overview of where psychotherapy fits into the overall schema of psychiatric training and practice, and it offers the tools for establishing therapeutic relationships with the great variety of distressed patients who seek competent and professional psychiatric care." --p. xi.
The Perspectives approach to psychiatry focuses on four aspects of psychiatric practice and research: disease, dimensional, behavior, and lifestory. In Systematic Psychiatric Evaluation, Drs. Margaret S. Chisolm and Constantine G. Lyketsos underscore the benefits of this approach, showing how it improves clinicians' abilities to evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients. Drs. Chisolm and Lyketsos use increasingly complex case histories to help the mental health provider evaluate patients demonstrating symptoms of bipolar disorder, psychosis, suicidal ideation, depression, eating disorders, and cutting, among other conditions. The book also includes an exercise that simulates the Perspectives approach side by side with traditional methods, revealing the advantages of a method that engages not one but four points of view. Featuring a foreword by Drs. Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney, the originators of the Perspectives approach, this innovative book will be used in psychiatric training programs as well as by practicing mental health clinicians. -- Arnold E. Andersen, M.D., The University of Iowa College of Medicine
Because most psychiatric illnesses are complex phenomena, no single method or approach is sufficient to explain them or the experiences of persons who suffer from them. In The Concepts of Psychiatry S. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D. argues that the discipline of psychiatry can therefore be understood best from a pluralistic perspective. Grounding his approach in the works of Paul McHugh, Phillip Slavney, Leston Havens, and others, Ghaemi incorporates a more explicitly philosophical discussion of the strengths of a pluralistic model and the weaknesses of other approaches, such as biological or psychoanalytic theories, the biopsychosocial model, or eclecticism. Ghaemi's methodology is twofold: on the one...
The author argues that to understand mental illness fully requires more than a study of biological models of mental processes and pathologies. He stresses that the causes of human mental disorders are to be found in human interactions.
This book is a practical reference for clinicans who care for patients with the neurologic diseases. Focused on the evaluation and treatment of psychiatric conditions that ffect the vast majority of these patients, the book draws from the collective wisdom and clinical expertise of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Division of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neuropsychiatry.
"The author details a plan for helping individuals who have a mental health issue flourish in their lives"--
Orthodox psychiatric texts are often rich in facts, but thin in concept. Depression may be defined as a dysfunction of mood, but of what use is a mood? How can anxiety be both symptom and adaptation to stress? What links the disparate disabilities of perception and reasoning in schizophrenia? Why does the same situation push one person into drink, drugs, danger, or despair and bounce harmlessly off another? Trouble in Mind is unorthodox because it models adaptive mental function along with mental illness to answer questions like these. From experience as a Johns Hopkins clinician, educator, and researcher, Dean F. MacKinnon offers a unique perspective on the nature of human anguish, unreason...