Recovery, Meaning-Making, and Severe Mental Illness offers practitioners an integrative treatment model that will stimulate and harness their creativity, allowing for the formation of new ideas about wellness in the face of profound suffering. The model, Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT), complements current treatment modalities and can be used by practitioners from a broad range of theoretical backgrounds. By using metacognitive capacity as a guide to intervention, MERIT stretches and strengthens practitioners’ capacity for reflection and allows them to better use their unique knowledge to help people who are confronting the suffering and chaos that often comes from psychosis. Clinicians will come away from this book with a variety of tools for helping clients manage their own recovery and confront the issues that accompany an illness-based identity.

Focuses on a shift away from traditional clinical preoccupations towards new priorities of supporting the patient.

This book brings together two bodies of knowledge - wellbeing and recovery. Wellbeing and 'positive' approaches are increasingly influencing many areas of society. Recovery in mental illness has a growing empirical evidence base. For the first time, overlaps and cross-fertilisation opportunities between the two bodies of knowledge are identified. International experts present innovations taking place within the mental health system, which include wellbeing-informed new therapies, e-health approaches and peer-led recovery communities. State-of-the-art applications of wellbeing to the wider community are also described, across education, employment, parenting and city planning. This book will be of interest to anyone connected with the mental health system, especially people using and working in services, and clinical and administrators leaders, and those interested in using research from the mental health system in the wider community.

This handbook is the definitive resource for understanding current mental health policy controversies, options, and implementation strategies. It offers a thorough review of major issues in mental health policy to inform the policy-making process, presenting the pros and cons of controversial, significant issues through close analyses of data. Some of the topics covered are the effectiveness of various biomedical and psychosocial interventions, the role of mental illness in violence, and the effectiveness of coercive strategies. The handbook presents cases for conditions in which specialized mental health services are needed and those in which it might be better to deliver mental health treatment in mainstream health and social services settings. It also examines the balance between federal, state, and local authority, and the financing models for delivery of efficient and effective mental health services. It is aimed for an audience of policy-makers, researchers, and informed citizens that can contribute to future policy deliberations.

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

This is an invitation to a spiritual awakening. The author demonstrates the relevance of spiritual issues to pragmatic concerns - of modern life, weaving the diverse insights of spiritual traditions into a tapestry of creativity and renewal. By the author of Lost Goddesses of Early Greece.

This is a rare collection of papers by leading authorities on addiction recovery. The distinguished list of contributors includes Alan Marlatt, George Vaillant, Stanton Peele, Jaak Panksepp, and Scott Tonigan. Although each represents different theoretical perspectives of addiction and recovery, all see recovery as more than mere abstinence. The first half of this book contains addresses from the Fourth International Meaning Conference, which focused on meaning and addiction. The second half of this volume uniquely focuses on the positive psychology of meaning and spirituality as an answer for addiction. The existential dilemmas of meaninglessness, boredom, and anxieties often trigger cravings for substance abuse. Geoffrey Thompson and Paul T. P. Wong articulate that only a personally meaningful life is powerful enough to overcome addictive cravings and satisfy the deep-seated human yearnings for happiness and meaning. Ken Hart connects the spiritual underpinnings of Alcoholics Anonymous to the New Thought movement and transpersonal psychology. This edited volume offers practical resources not only for addiction counselors and treatment centers, but also for college and university professors who teach addiction studies. Instead of focusing on coping skills and cognitive-behavioral strategies, a holistic approach emphasizes fulfilling the human needs for well-being, meaningful living, and self-transcendence. "This book is transformative, renewing a sense of aliveness and community from the deadness of addiction." -Brent Potter, PhD, author, Elements of Self-Destruction "This bracing volume offers an open-minded and open-hearted exploration of many key issues touching addiction and its treatment, from grief and loss to meaning and spirituality. It ranges far beyond the narrow and limiting confines of the usual reductionist perspectives." -Gabor Mate, MD, author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction "Perhaps one of the most important additions in years in the literature on the intersection between existential and positive psychology, and its application for substance abuse disorders." -Alexander Batthyany, PhD, International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein; University of Vienna; Director, Viktor Frankl Institute, Austria; principal editor, Collected Works of Viktor Frankl (14 volumes)."

After healing her own unhealthy relationship with money, and transforming her financial disaster into prosperity and security, Karen McCall created a recovery program she has now used for more than twenty years to help individuals, couples, and businesses large and small. In the midst of her money troubles, she saw a need for something other than financial planners, accountants, and credit counselors. These experts could tell her what she should be doing differently, but she needed someone to help her understand the underlying causes of chronic, self-defeating overspending and credit card debt, underearning, and low or no savings. To save herself, she created practical, holistic tools that address these sources of pain and shame. McCall’s program supports people as they uncover their deep-seated attitudes about money; provides simple, step-by-step tools for healing areas of physical, emotional, and spiritual deprivation; and teaches skills and strategies for experiencing lasting personal and financial fulfillment even in the midst of economic challenges and reversals.

The Rcovery of Meaning is an unabridged reprint of the 1988 Smithsonian Institute book of the same title, with a new prologue by Mark Leone.