Trauma And Serious Mental Illness

For decades, the idea that serious mental illnesses (SMIs) are almost exclusively biologically-based and must be treated pharmacologically has been commonplace in psychology literature. As a result, many mental health professionals have stopped listening to their clients, categorizing their symptoms as manifestations of neurologically-based disturbed thinking. Trauma and Serious Mental Illness is the groundbreaking series of works that challenge this standard view and provides a comprehensive introduction to the emerging perspective of SMIs as trauma-based. This unique collection illustrates how different psychotherapy approaches can lead to reduced symptomatology, decreased psychological distress, and improved functioning in individuals living with SMIs.

An exploration of the newfound connections between mental illness and trauma For decades, the idea that serious mental illnesses (SMIs) are almost exclusively biologically-based and must be treated pharmacologically has been commonplace in psychology literature. As a result, many mental health professionals have stopped listening to their clients, categorizing their symptoms as manifestations of neurologically-based disturbed thinking. Trauma and Serious Mental Illness is the groundbreaking series of works that challenge this standard view and provides a comprehensive introduction to the emerging perspective of SMIs as trauma-based. This unique collection illustrates how different psychotherapy approaches can lead to reduced symptomatology, decreased psychological distress, and improved functioning in individuals living with SMIs. Each extensively-referenced chapter in Trauma and Serious Mental Illness offers mental health workers a forward-looking theoretical inquiry, empirical study, or critical treatise providing compelling counter evidence to challenge the widespread belief that SMIs are not reactions to the extreme and extremely disturbing circumstances embodied by psychological trauma. In addition to the etiological application, this revealing text proposes ways to incorporate this cutting-edge approach toward treatment options as well. Contributors to Trauma and Serious Mental Illness suggest that: childhood trauma is related to psychotic disorders dissociation can be confounded with psychotic symptoms auditory hallucinations can be diagnostic of dissociation rather than psychosis psychosis is related to the quality of family of origin environment and to age of onset of childhood abuse bipolar and trauma-related disorders sometimes overlap individuals with SMIs suffer related trauma even in treatment facilities and much more! Trauma and Serious Mental Illness is an eye-opening resource for mental health professionals, psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, social workers, trauma workers, and educators and students in these disciplines.

Mental, physical, or sexual abuse in close personal relationships commonly results in trauma that is very different from the trauma of accidents, illness, or war. Making creative use of attachment theory to explicate the multifaceted outcomes of trauma, this book provides a powerful conceptual framework and a concise, masterly review of a huge knowledge base. Encyclopedic in scope and scholarly in its up-to-the-minute survey of research findings.

Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.

"The book, Women with Serious Mental Illness: Gender-Sensitive and Recovery-Oriented Care, calls attention to a topic and population that has been overlooked in research and psychotherapy - women with serious mental illnesses (i.e., schizophrenia, severe depression, bipolar disorder, and complex posttraumatic stress disorder). Women with Serious Mental Illness focuses on the history of mistreatment, marginalization, and oppression they have encountered in the general public and within the mental health system. This book provides an overview of recovery-oriented care for women with serious mental illness - a process of seeking hope, empowerment, and self-determination beyond the effects of mental illness. Chapters provide a historical overview of the treatment of women with mental illness, their resilience and recovery experiences, as well as issues pertaining to relationships, work, class, culture, trauma, and sexuality. This book also offers the new model of Gender-Sensitive and Recovery Oriented Care (G-ROC) for working with this group from a gender-sensitive framework. The book is a useful tool for mental health educators and providers, with each chapter containing case studies, clinical strategies lists, discussion questions, experiential activities, diagrams, and worksheets that can be completed with clients, students, and peers"--

Each day, case managers, psychiatric nurses, and other mental health professionals interact with adults who have a history of physical and/or sexual abuse during childhood. Many of these important professionals will often be the first practitioners to hear about a client′s background of abuse, but they may not have specialized training in understanding and working with survivors of childhood trauma. The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Mental Illness gives mental health professionals who are not child abuse specialists knowledge and skills that are especially relevant to their direct service role and practice context. It introduces to these practitioners a conceptual bridge between biomedical and psychosocial understandings of mental disorder, providing a multidimensional approach that allows professionals to think holistically and connect clients′ abusive pasts with their present-day symptoms and behaviors. Building upon this conceptual foundation, the book then focuses on direct practice issues, including how to ask clients about child abuse, the nature of power in the helping relationship, the full recovery process, effective treatment models, client safety issues, and ways to listen to client′s stories. Also included are valuable insights into helping clients who are in a crisis situation, the particular needs of male victims of child abuse, racial and cultural considerations, and the professional′s self-care. Designed to meet the needs of such helping professionals as case managers, psychiatric nurses, rehabilitation counselors, crisis and housing workers, occupational and physical therapists, family physicians, and social workers, The Link Between Childhood Trauma and Mental Illness is an accessible and convenient guide to understanding the effects of childhood abuse and incorporating that understanding into direct practice.