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Psychology

 

Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

 

Mental Retardation: A LifeSpan Approach to People with Intellectual Disabilities, Eighth Edition by Clifford J. Drew & Michael L. Hardman (Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall) provides an introduction to mental retardation that is readable and comprehensive, and which reflects the broad array of stories associated with this disability. The authors combine a developmental approach—discussing their subject as it evolves from birth to the elder years—with a multidisciplinary perspective that acknowledges the need for collaboration in regard to diagnosis and intervention in order to effectively assist people with mental retardation and their families. Coverage pays particular attention to multicultural issues and incorporates the latest research in the field. Writing for future special education teachers, or those in the psychology and social work field, Clifford J. Drew, associate vice president for instructional technology and outreach in the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah, and professor in the Departments of Special Education and Educational Psychology, and Michael L. Hardman, associate dean for research in the College of Education and department chair and professor in special education at the University of Utah, present the eighth edition of Mental Retardation. This volume is strongly based in human development, as suggested by the title. One of their earlier reviewers termed it "womb to tomb." Readers will follow the development of individuals with in­tellectual disabilities from conception through birth, infancy, and early childhood and then through the elementary school, adolescent, and adult years. Mental retar­dation is a field in which this complete cycle of human life is important for a full un­derstanding of the challenges and issues involved.

The authors also examine mental retardation from the perspective of many disciplines, essential, since a diagnosis of intellectual disabilities and the resulting treatment or intervention may come from any of several disciplines and of­ten requires their united efforts. Mental retardation has always presented unique challenges to society and its various government and private agencies as they respond to, interact with, and as­sist these people and their families.

This text is designed primarily for students in education and the social and be­havioral sciences who are at the upper‑division undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Students in general and special education, psychology, educational psychology, sociology, rehabilitation, and social work will find the book particularly relevant to their preparation. Premed students and individuals anticipating professional work in nurs­ing, law, and administration will also find information that facilitates their careers.  

Changes in This Edition

This edition includes many changes suggested by reviewers and students. The authors have combined some topics, reorganized others, and eliminated discussions of some areas where students and reviewers thought such changes were important. The title and language used in this edition also reflect changes that are emerging in the field. Intellectual disabilities is a term that is beginning to replace mental retardation. To some degree, the authors have used intellectual disabilities and mental retardation interchangeably as this transition emerges. This approach is employed to facilitate communication with our readers as the field moves forward.

This edition also has updated and expanded coverage of a number of growing areas related to mental retardation. In all areas, they have attempted to personalize the discussions, opening, it is hoped, the human and personal sides of people with intellectual disabilities to examination. The chapter on multicultural issues related to the risks of intellectual disabili­ties continues to evolve as this broad area of concern matures. In addition to mate­rial in this chapter, other topics relevant to multicultural issues, such as assessment bias and educational supports, are integrated throughout the text.

Other areas of discussion also continue to mature in a manner that permits a more complete attainment of the original goals for the text. For example, the text continues to focus on the full cycle of human development. Consequently, as the body of research on infants, toddlers, adults, and senior citizens with intellectual disabilities has grown, examination of these individuals has expanded. The commitment to analyzing men­tal retardation within the conceptual framework of human development remains and is much more complete in this edition than was possible when Drew and Hardman wrote the first edition more than 30 years ago. The purpose for this edition is largely the same as it was with the release of the first. The authors hope that they have refined their skills and come closer to achieving their original dream. The field has also changed, and new topics have emerged as knowledge accumulated and societal emphasis fluctuated. Mental Retardation tries to reflect those changes while also retaining the fundamentals.

In addition to the basic information presented in the text are a number of ped­agogical features to engage the reader actively, to facilitate a more complete under­standing of the material, and to provide instructors with a wider variety of teaching options. Each chapter begins with core concepts that guide readers through the discussion. Each core concept is repeated where it is discussed and finally is related to core questions designed to promote student comprehension. At the end of each chapter is a roundtable discussion that presents an issue or a topic of interest in a format aimed at stimulating dialogue. All these features have been incorporated to encourage active participation and interaction with the material.

Companion Website. Technology is a constantly growing and changing aspect of mental retardation that is creating a need for content and resources. To address this emerging need, Prentice Hall has developed an online learning environment for students and professors alike with com­panion websites to support their textbooks.

The goal in creating a Companion Website was to build on and enhance what the textbook already offered. For this reason, the content is organized by topic and provides professors and students a variety of meaningful resources.

  • The Companion Website integrates Syllabus Manager, an online syllabus cre­ation and management utility.
  • Syllabus Manager provides the instructor, with an easy, step‑by­-step process to create and revise syllabi, with direct links into Companion Website and other online content without having to learn HTML.
  • Students may log on to the professor’s syllabus during any study session with the web address for the Companion Website and the password assigned to the syllabus.
  • After the instructors have created a syllabus using Syllabus Manager, students may enter the syllabus for their course section from any point in the Companion Website.
  • Clicking on a date, the student is shown the list of activities for the assign­ment. The activities for each assignment are linked directly to actual con­tent, saving time for students.
  • Adding assignments consists of clicking on the desired due date, then fill in the details of the assignment.
  • Links to other activities can be created easily. If the activity is online, a URL can be entered in the space provided, and it will be linked automatically in the final syllabus.
  • The completed syllabus is hosted on Prentice Hall’s servers, allowing convenient updates from any computer on the Internet. Changes the professor makes to the syllabus are immediately available to students at their next logon.

For Students

  • Overview and General Information about the topic and how it will be covered in the website.
  • Web Links – A variety of websites related to topic areas.
  • Content Methods and Strategies – Resources that help to put theories into practice in the special education classroom.
  • Reflective Questions and Case‑Based Activities so students put concepts into action, participate in activities, and examine strategies.
  • National and State Laws – An online guide to how federal and state laws affect the special education classroom.
  • Behavior Management – An online guide to help instructors manage behaviors in the special education classroom.
  • Message Board – Virtual bulletin board to post and respond to questions and comments from a national audience.

To take advantage of these and other resources, students and professors may visit the Mental Retardation: A Lifespan Approach to People with Intellectual Disabilities, Eighth Edition Companion Website at www.prenhall.com/drew

Life Inside: A Memoir by Mindy Lewis (Washington Square Press)  The patient is an ascetically pretty 15 ½ year old white female. She is intelligent, fearful, extremely anxious, and depressed. Her rage is poorly controlled and inappropriately expressed.

Diagnostic Impression: Program for social recovery in a supportive and structured environment appears favorable.

In 1967, three months before her sixteenth birthday, Mindy Lewis was sent to a state psychiatric hospital by court order. Acutely shy, distrustful of authority, she had been skipping school, smoking pot, and listening to too much Dylan. Her mother, at a loss for what else to do, decided that Mindy would remain in state custody until she turned eighteen and became a legal, law‑abiding, "healthy" adult.

Remanded by the court to state custody, Mindy was sent to a renowned state psychiatric hospital, where she would remain until she turned eighteen. A richly textured exploration of life on a psychiatric ward, Lewis's memoir, Life Inside, probes our culture's perceptions of the lines that separate craziness and creativity, power and powerlessness, self‑destruction and healthy self‑expression, clinical diagnosis and genuine, lasting healing. The author writes vividly of the community of adolescent and young adult patients, many hospitalized for questionable reasons, the politics and routines of institutional life, the extensive use of medication, and the frightening prevalence of life‑altering misdiagnoses. A chilling implication of Mindy's story is that, with a slight shift of circumstances, it might have happened to anyone.

Life Inside also charts the author's three decades of post‑hospital life, describing the challenge of entering adulthood bearing the stigma of having been labeled mentally ill. She attended college, tried various therapies, joined the Mental Patients Liberation Project, and developed long‑dormant artistic skills. She also found herself caring for her dying father. Jobs came and went, as did her depression and anger, yet the will to survive never abandoned her. After accessing her medical records with the diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia she declared, "I do not believe it. I was never schizophrenic. Not then, not now."

Ironically, the same traits that contributed to Lewis's incarceration in the first place – rebelliousness, the need to create, and love for the life of the mind – were the very things that steered her onto a path of healthy independence. In rejecting the diagnosis and prescriptions imposed upon her by the psychiatric establishment, the author navigates a course toward reclaiming the other life inside – ­the inner life.

Inviting us to take a close look at contemporary views of mental health through the lens of her own powerful and intimately rendered story, in Life Inside, Lewis has written an important memoir, as tough and candid as it is inspiring and compassionate.

The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe, 1500-1850 by Jane Kromm (Continuum) is a masterful analysis of public madness from the Renaissance to the Industrial Age. Frenzy - the most flagrant and political form of madness - is the madness of warrior-heroes, kings, scolds, and the possessed. Its representation incorporates a range of traditional characters and figures, from Hercules and Orlando to Medea and Britannia.  

Integrating art history with cultural studies, political history, and the history of medicine, the book draws on a wide range of media and contexts - from asylum sculpture to political broadsheets, medical texts, the imagery of revolution, caricatures, and medical illustrations. Understood as abusive power and belligerence out of control, and described in terms drawn equally from definitions of tyranny and liberty, frenzy was always articulated with a significant degree of political meaning. The Art of Frenzy clarifies the importance of this interpretative pattern.

The Art of Frenzy is a study of the most public, and consequently most visible, form of madness - that identified traditionally with the condition called mania. Conceived from the outset as an externalized disorder, mania was typically taken at face value. It was always identified with the visible trappings of behavior, gesture, and expression, and never associated with the subterranean, the subtle, or the elusive. What gave the maniacal its startling, even arresting, quality was this demonstrative, almost performative character: mania was a private trauma that intrusively claimed the public's awareness. A high degree of visible notoriety was thus always central to mania - in fact, the disorder's history and significance can only be fully understood by investigating its visual articulation across images and texts.

Despite its association with such simplistic exteriorized traits as agitation, impetuous movement, and disorderliness, mania was no mere superficial phenomenon, but one characterized by impressively fluid and complex historical affiliations. Mania was also called furor or frenzy, and its symptoms were sometimes regarded as the root cause of demonic possession. The condition was related to an excess of the passions, and to excessive anger in particular. Acts of violence without rational justifica­tion were considered a common form of the disorder, but other aggressive traits, especially sexual ones, were also thought to be typical. This inclination toward belligerence and aggressive sexuality meant that contemporary assumptions about gender would always be critical elements in the dynamics of mania.

The position of mania, furor, or frenzy altered dramatically in the early modern period when their traditional themes were implicated in a series of major shifts and critical debates. Redefinitions of civility and incivility in primarily exterior terms alerted many to the dangerously uncivil behavior identified with mania. The increased number of wandering, marginal, unsavory types associated with too much of the wrong kind of liberty similarly raised the specter of mania's symptoms and their logic. Practices of confinement also targeted mania, and the creation of imposing edifices with decorative signage raised maniacal traits to a permanent visual and civic status. Mania's relation to energy, passion, and excess construed in increasingly secular, behavioral terms colored re-evaluations of the diagnosis in medical writing. As vices were transformed into passions, they were codified in emblem books and expressive studies, gaining both a standard form and a prospectus for limited variation. In their handling of furor and ira, these treatises typically promoted the classical habit of aligning individual experience with that of the state, assuring for mania a critical role in the changing iconographies of war and tyranny.

Debates about madness in the early modern period tend to position folly or melancholy at the center of their definitions of significant disorder, allotting to mania a minor role on the periphery as a profoundly uninteresting phenomenon. But this marginal position has less to do with the disorder's comparative metaphoric thinness, and everything to do with the progressive loss of status and downward trajectory that mania's reputation suffered. The social implications of mania's symptoms facilitated this decline in status and enabled the disorder's attributes - especially aggression, insubordination, and disregard for authority - to be drawn into a series of political controversies from the seventeenth century through the post-Napoleonic period. Mania figured prominently in the claims and counterclaims exchanged around such issues as the pursuit of mindlessly aggressive policies, and disputes over prerogatives and rights, liberties and anarchy. Eventually mania's repeatedly politicized status made it a liability for those describing its symptoms in word and image.

Representations of the insane that included mania along with a variety of other ailments first became a particular area of study in the late nineteenth century.

The present study is indebted to three influential methodologies that have altered the way images are understood in relation to their historical context. The first is Saturn and Melancholy (1964), the joint work of Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, which traces the iconography of melancholy alongside that humor's position in philosophical and medical treatises from antiquity through the Renais-sance. The most traditional of the three positions considered here, this study nevertheless demonstrated not only an exemplary interdisciplinarity but also that changes in perceptions of melancholy were often shaped by its visual articulation, or through some interactive relationship between the visual and the textual, significantly weakening the conventional premise that images are reflective rather than constitutive elements in culture. Lynn Hunt, in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), advanced this position by demonstrating the critical role of images and symbols in articulating political processes and in giving direction to the forces of social change. Hunt argued that it was the symbolic practices (images, gestures, and rhetoric) as well as the people who practiced them that "provided the logic of revolutionary political action."" Looking at other models for the way art functions in the public sphere, Linda Nochlin's adaptation of Frederic Jameson's notion of a "political unconscious" proposed that the political element in visual culture might not always be the result of a self-aware or even fully conscious application, but that the "political in the work of art ... or in the processes of art making" was more in the nature of an "unconscious ... inscription" across the visual field.

Elements derived from all three of these projects have influenced the methodological composite that has guided the present work. Tracing mania's trajectory from classical motifs and texts through the humoral tradition of the early modern era takes its inspiration from the study of melancholy by Panofsky, et al., but supplements this model with a more socially conscious conception of historical context. The maniacal elements of visual culture are considered, following Hunt's lead, as integral to the processes that shaped certain political discourses, and this representa­tional percept can be found in relation to major upheavals even before the decade of the French Revolution. Adopting Nochlin's orientation, the phenomenon of mania in its visibly dangerous aspect can be best understood as a not always entirely conscious pictorial and political strategy.

Most of the works analyzed in The Art of Frenzy are European representations produced from the 1500s through to the 1830s. English, French, and Dutch contributions dominate the field, with the exception of some crucial Italian works that revived mania's antique prototypes and codified its classical motifs for emblematic and allegorical consumption all over Europe. The images consulted range from book vignettes, engravings and print cycles, to altarpieces, asylum sculptures, royal decorative projects, political and social caricature, and medical illustrations. All of the works under consideration were acknowledged by their authors and audiences as having some distinctive connection with mania or the conditions affiliated with it. Chapter 1 examines mania as it was conceptualized in the classical era and in its particular role in the madness of warriors. Chapter 2 traces the decline of this form of heroic mania as it was diffused over a broad range of everyday, unheroic circumstances as likely to involve women as men. A new level of notoriety for mania was achieved when it became the representation of choice in depictions of demonic possession and asylum decoration. In Chapter 3, maniacal characterizations begin to infiltrate political caricature and allegory, with women increasingly taking on the role of the belligerent maniac. Chapter 4 examines the position of mania in out-of-doors politics and in revolutionary ideology, while Chapter 5 studies the dominance of the disorder among representations of the insane of the kind that were manipulated for professional and political advantage by the alienists of nineteenth-century Paris. The epilogue sketches out the nineteenth-century theories and representations of hysteria that colonized and then obliterated mania's visibility and performative uniqueness.

Encyclopedia of Mental Health by Ada P. Kahn, Jan. Fawcett (Library of Health and Living: Facts on File) identifies and explains the psychological and physical aspects of mental health in some 1,300 alphabetically arranged entries that provide information on a wide range of topics related to the field, including: common terminology, such as depression, behavioral therapy, and schizophrenia; social issues, such as aging, pollution, "safe sex," and sexual harassment; topical concerns, such as eating disorders, Alzheimer's disease, dyslexia, sexual dysfunction, and hyperactivity disorder; pharmacology, such as antianxiety medications, anticonvulsant medications, and antidepressants; and forms of therapy, such as family therapy, sex therapy, and psychotherapy.

Accessible information about mental health is always in demand. People are interested in everything from serious disorders and the psychological effects of physical conditions to phobias and stress management. The Encyclopedia of Mental Health provides an overview of this vast field. The authors are a medical administrator and a psychiatrist.

Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Mental Health edited by Scott Shannon (Academic Press) provides a wide-ranging outline of complementary and alternative therapy treatments in mental health, with information on their effectiveness and safety for specific patient populations and for use in treating specific disorders.

Handbook of Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Mental Health presents a comprehensive overview of rapidly expanding field that includes chapters by 24 leading psychiatric/psychological experts in these fields and documents and rates the research base in each area to offer practical clinical approaches for four common mental health concerns—depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addictions. It includes reviews of areas not yet covered in professional training courses and covers practices commonly employed by the public (40-50% of the American public use complementary or alternative approaches) There are few previous books of this nature or scope for professional audience.

This is an excellent compendium of integrative and holistic therapies, not just for mental health. The editor, Scott Shannon, MD, is a holistic child psychiatrist from Fort Collins, Colorado, who is the current president of the American Holistic Medical Association. His three chapters provide an excellent foundation for a holistic approach to all mental health problems. Knowledge needs to be applied with Wisdom. Psychiatric medications should be combined not only with psychotherapy or counseling, but also an individual plan of personal and spiritual growth. The carefully chosen contributors to this text are all experts in their field, ranging from acupuncture to art and music therapy. The practical information provided is useful for patients and clinicians alike. This groundbreaking text should become a standard reference for any mental health care professional. It is well written, and a pleasurable read.

Contents: Contributors. Preface.Part I: Overview S. Shannon, Introduction: The Emerging Paradigm. S. Shannon, Integration and Holism. Part II: Physical Modalities R.P. Lee, Cranial Osteopathy. R. D'Angelo, Aromatherapy. J. Settle, Diet and Essential Fatty Acids. J. Settle, Nutritional Supplements. Part III: Mind-Body Approaches D. Moss, Biofeedback. K. Lowenstein, Meditation and Self-Regulatory Techniques. J. Lake, Qigong. B. Sultanoff, Breath Work. Part IV: Spiritual Approaches J.R. Bonadonna, Therapeutic Touch. D. Benor, Spiritual Healing. E. Leskowitz, Medical Intuition. J. Wyker,Spiritual Psychotherapy. Part V: Modern Innovations W.M. Zangwill, J. Pearson, and P. Kosminsky, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). M. Fallon-Cyr and M. Fallon-Cyr, The Hakomi Method and Body-Centered Psychotherapies. M. Schupbach, Process Work. Part VI: Traditional Medical System H. Cass and J. Cott, Herbal Medicine. P. Bailey, Homeopathy. J. Motl, Acupuncture. J. Brooks, Ayurveda. Part VII: Other Approaches J.R. Graham-Pole, The Creative Arts: What Role Do They Play? B.A. Sultanoff, The Environment. J. Diamond, The Therapeutic Power of Music. Part VIII: Synthesis S. Shannon, Synthesis. Appendix. Index. Synthesis.

 

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