A practical guide to counselling clients who present with physical symptoms, but where psychological issues or problems are causing or maintaining those symptoms. The author examines the terminology and the definitions of physical or psychological illness, with examples. She describes a cognitive model, illustrated with common somatic problems, such as atypical chest pain, covering the factors which maintain the problems - as well as the client's schema, beliefs and assumptions which may underlie them - and takes the reader through the different stages of the counselling process. She then explains the psychological categories and terminology used to describe the client group, and addresses key counselling issues in working with them, including advice on how to engage the client in counselling, how to formulate and conceptualize the client's problems, and develop counselling goals with the client to help the client work towards these goals. Significant advances have been made in this field, and this practical text makes available new approaches to helping clients with psychosomatic problems, whom traditional medical practitioners have found difficult to help.
This text explores the questions which lie at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. The contributors consider such issues as: whether the distinctive identities of gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality, which have long defined the social and cultural world of modern societies, are in decline; whether new forms of identification are rising up and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject; and how this "crisis of identity" relates to the wider process of changes which are generating problems for modern societies and undermining the frameworks through which people relate to institutions, each other and themselves. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity and provide both theoretical and substantive insights into different approaches to understanding identity - illuminating and advancing debates about identity and its futures. This book should be useful reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across a wide range of the humanities and the social sciences.
Inter-organizational collaboration is becoming increasingly significant as a means of achieving organizational objectives in turbulent environments. Yet it is not an easy process to implement successfully. Drawing on the work of authors with a high level of relevant experience, this volume provides a thought-provoking and accessible introduction to the theory and practice of `creating collaborative advantage'. The first part of the book develops a framework of key dimensions for understanding collaboration. Different perspectives highlight the diversity of rationales and contexts involved, and the range of elements which need to be considered and addressed when embarking on collaborative endeavours. The second section focuses in more detail on collaboration in practice. It examines the problems that can occur when different `stakeholders', who frequently hold different aims, cultures, procedures, professional languages and power resources, work across organizational boundaries. The last section addresses specifically the processes of acting as a facilitator to collaborative groups. It discusses how and why a third party facilitator role can be helpful, and explores the various processes and techniques that can be used.
I was most impressed by the author's thoroughness in writing this book. She seems to leave no stone uncovered... [this is] a work which should become a necessity for all counsellors, counselling psychologists, psychiatric nurses and psychotherapists... This is a book to which I will make reference time and time again, and one which will occupy a prominent place in my library' - Counselling, The Journal of the British Association for Counselling `An invaluable handbook for students of psychotherapy and a good reference for established therapists... I recommend that all therapists have a copy of this book on their shelf' - Psychology, Health & Medicine Assessment and referral skills are essential for counsellors and psychotherapists. Practitioners need to have an understanding of the clinical manifestations of severe emotional distress. They must, for example, be able to recognize when clients are a suicide risk or when they are suffering from a psychotic episode. This lively textbook provides a clear overview of the issues involved in our understanding of psychopathology and offers guidelines on appropriate interventions. Alessandra Lemma explores a range of key topics, covering how psychiatric diagnoses and classifications are arrived at, and the issues that can arise when working in conjunction with other mental health practitioners, such as psychiatrists. She addresses the needs of practitioners in relation to some of the more common forms of mental distress - depression, anxiety and eating problems - as well as some of the more controversial diagnoses, such as schizophrenia and `borderline personality disorder'. The book concludes with a discussion of alternatives to mainstream approaches, including those which seek to deconstruct the concept of psychopathology. Introduction to Psychopathology offers a framework for assessing clients which incorporates a broad range of models and approaches, and which takes into account psychological, social and biological factors. It will be an invaluable resource for students of counselling, counselling psychology, psychotherapy and clinical psychology.
Simone de Beauvoir is the subject of the second book in the series "Women of Ideas". This, and succeeding volumes will: provide succinct introductions to the ideas of women who have been recognized as major theorists; make the work of major women of ideas accessible to students and those who wish to know more; appraise and reappriase the work of neglected women of ideas and give them a higher profile; and provide a full bibliography of its subject's writings, where they are easily available. In this volume, Mary Evans demonstrates the importance to feminism of de Beauvoir's ideas. She shows how de Beauvoir's work resists simplistic readings and cannot be reduced to opposition between masculine and feminine, rational and irrational, or social and natural. She argues that de Beauvoir's work is autobiographical and presents an analysis of the complex relations between fact, faction and autobiography. This book also demonstrates that de Beauvoir's profound political agenda for a "New Woman" is a vital legacy for feminism today.
This text addresses the increasing polarization between traditional criminological theory and sceptical postmodernism. It seeks to offer a creative approach to understanding and explaining crime by drawing together disparate perspectives towards interdisciplinary integration. The authors develop a "constitutive" theory of crime that integrates insights from both modernist and postmodernist social and criminological theory, to examine the co-production of crime by human subjects and by the social and organizational structures that humans develop. This text aims to deconstruct the traditional discourse of crime and criminal justice, and replace it with a new discourse which offers greater possibilities of preventing recurrence of crime.
This book provides a distinctive overview and analysis of the place of social construction in social psychology. The author's arguments revolve around two key questions: how can social constructionism account for changes in human identities?; and in what ways might social constructionism accommodate a role for nonhumans - whether technological or "natural" - in the constitution of identity? With interdisciplinary breadth the book locates these questions between recent innovations in social psychology and the highly influential contributions of actor-network theory, which has come to dominate the sociology of scientific knowledge. The fruitful mix of these perspectives sustains a clear and coherent discussion of how issues around agency, hybridity, marginality and the "other" can contribute to a better understanding of human identity. "Constructing Identities" should be of value to students and academics in social psychology, the sociology of scientific knowledge and anyone addressing the central concept of identity.
This text reflects recent changes in the training of probation and social workers. It addresses issues of knowledge, skills and practice as well as contemporary social issues. It also appraises policies and professional requirements critically. The book is divided into three sections: issues which inform practice - training skills and competencies, anti-discriminatory practice, autonomy and accountability, masculinity and the causes of crime; the contexts in which working with offenders takes place - probation boards; pre-sentence reports, community penalties, prison and the community; the outcomes of good practice - partnerships against crime and effectiveness and evaluation of crime prevention.
This text explores the inability of the "crimino-legal complex" - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and ordinary, individual everyday experiences - to solve the problem of crime and criminality. It examines a number of events which have been taken to represent something definitive about crime. Each event is seen as representing the crisis within the crimino-legal tradition in different ways. Topics discussed include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the ambiguities of victimization in relation to social justice in the city; conjugal homicide and illegal immigration; the pleasures of reading about crime in detective fiction; the discovery of the limits in the representation of crime when two children killed another child (the Bulger case); the governmental campaigns against single motherhood as a challenge to the heterosexual norm; and HIV/AIDS as spectacle in criminal justive policies.
