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Managing Self-Harm: Psychological Perspectives
Self-harm often arises at moments of despair or emotional intensity, and its reasons are not necessarily available to the conscious mind. Managing Self-Harm explores the meaning and impact of self-harm, and the sense in which it is a language of the body. It is designed to help clinicians, people who self-harm and their families and carers to understand its causes, meaning and treatment.
Each chapter integrates theory with clinical illustration, enabling the direct experiences of those who self-harm to be heard and reflecting the populations that are most likely to self-harm. The contributors are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, including clinical psychology, psychotherapy, group analysis and psychiatric nursing. Areas of discussion This book does not offer a prescription for self-harm cessation but rather describes therapeutic approaches to working with self-harm, and outlines the complex, subtle and meaningful interactions between those who engage in self-harm and those who seek to understand it. With a specialist interest in women’s self-harm, Managing Self-Harm will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, including clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and social workers.
Each chapter integrates theory with clinical illustration, enabling the direct experiences of those who self-harm to be heard and reflecting the populations that are most likely to self-harm. The contributors are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, including clinical psychology, psychotherapy, group analysis and psychiatric nursing. Areas of discussion This book does not offer a prescription for self-harm cessation but rather describes therapeutic approaches to working with self-harm, and outlines the complex, subtle and meaningful interactions between those who engage in self-harm and those who seek to understand it. With a specialist interest in women’s self-harm, Managing Self-Harm will be essential reading for all mental health professionals, including clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and social workers.
- GenresMental Health
248 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2007
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August 20, 2015
This book is fascinatingly bad.
I was close to throwing the book away after the first chapter, but in the end I decided to read on because the book was simply fascinating to me - fascinatingly bad. Multiple questions arose early on which I felt I needed answers to - questions like: How did this book ever get published? Had drunken chimps taken over the publishing house during the day the decision was made? Had the publisher just had a stroke, and they mistook his incoherent verbalizations for an indication that the book was okay? Was there a mix-up in the printing office, with the incoherent ramblings written on a toilet paper roll by a janitor ending up being published instead of the actual manuscript? Is it really a test-text written for psychology students aimed at figuring out how many of them will figure out that the hidden purpose of the book is to attempt to give a written account of typical language production in former psychoanalysts now suffering from Wernicke's aphasia (in which patients 'have fluent and apparently grammatical speech which often lacks meaning', Eysenck & Keane, p.436)?
Not all of it is completely terrible, but most of the book is really just an incoherent jumble of useless arguing and theorizing with close to zero data. The authors have worked with self-harming individuals for years, yet most of them to me come across as clueless morons who in my opinion shouldn't be let near anyone with psychological problems.
If you read this book as you would a standard academic text on a specific topic, in this case self-harm, you're going to get very disappointed. As an illustrative example of some of the many things that are dead wrong with psycho-analytical approaches to self-harm, with a good and proper mix of stupidity and lack of knowledge which occasionally reach hilarious proportions, it's a great book (but even so I'm still giving it one star).
I was close to throwing the book away after the first chapter, but in the end I decided to read on because the book was simply fascinating to me - fascinatingly bad. Multiple questions arose early on which I felt I needed answers to - questions like: How did this book ever get published? Had drunken chimps taken over the publishing house during the day the decision was made? Had the publisher just had a stroke, and they mistook his incoherent verbalizations for an indication that the book was okay? Was there a mix-up in the printing office, with the incoherent ramblings written on a toilet paper roll by a janitor ending up being published instead of the actual manuscript? Is it really a test-text written for psychology students aimed at figuring out how many of them will figure out that the hidden purpose of the book is to attempt to give a written account of typical language production in former psychoanalysts now suffering from Wernicke's aphasia (in which patients 'have fluent and apparently grammatical speech which often lacks meaning', Eysenck & Keane, p.436)?
Not all of it is completely terrible, but most of the book is really just an incoherent jumble of useless arguing and theorizing with close to zero data. The authors have worked with self-harming individuals for years, yet most of them to me come across as clueless morons who in my opinion shouldn't be let near anyone with psychological problems.
If you read this book as you would a standard academic text on a specific topic, in this case self-harm, you're going to get very disappointed. As an illustrative example of some of the many things that are dead wrong with psycho-analytical approaches to self-harm, with a good and proper mix of stupidity and lack of knowledge which occasionally reach hilarious proportions, it's a great book (but even so I'm still giving it one star).
Displaying 1 of 1 review