Psychology

Qualitative methods are increasingly useful as psychiatry shifts from a focus on symptom reduction to enabling people to live satisfying and meaningful lives. It becomes important to achieve a deeper understanding of the ways in which mental illness interferes with everyday life and the ways in which people can learn to manage and minimize illness in order to pursue their lives as fully as possible. Although qualitative methods in psychiatry have seen a dramatic upsurge, relatively few published studies use such methods specifically to explore the lives, socio-culturally and experientially, of those with first-episode psychosis.
This book highlights qualitative research in early psychosis. The first half of the book centres on the individual lived experience of psychosis—from the perspective of the individual, the family, and the practitioner. The second half moves from the micro level to the macro, focusing on broader system issues, including medical trainees’ encounters with first-episode psychosis in the emergency room and the implementation of first-episode clinics in the UK and Australia. This text is timely, as the proliferation of early-psychosis clinics worldwide demands that we inquire into the subjective experience of those impacted by psychosis and the social contexts within which it occurs and is lived out.
Hearing Voices is the first in a series of titles from The Community Health Systems Resource Group at The Hospital for Sick Children. This series will educate researchers, policy-makers, students, practitioners, and interested stakeholders on such topics as early intervention in psychosis, aggressive-behaviour problems, eating-related disorders, and marginalized youth in educational contexts.

This book presents a collection of writings by expert researchers from Canada, the United States, and Australia who are committed to finding common cause and common ground in the prevention of eating disorders and obesity.

The ten chapters in this book seek to create a new public health approach to the prevention of weight-related disorders, one that counters the confusion and frustration from public policies, messages, and programs that recipients of prevention efforts often experience. The first section looks at prevention from a public health perspective, and the second section highlights theories from risk and resilience research that can inform the prevention of weight-related disorders. The contributions are varied in their theories and models, but woven throughout is the theme of collaboration in changing public institutions and social systems that promotes universal prevention and fosters mental health and resilience. Unique methods of linking systems and fostering partnerships across sectors and disciplines are highlighted, and readers are exposed to innovative ideas of how to move the field of prevention science forward to reduce the onset of negative body image, unhealthy weight management, eating disorders, and disordered eating.

Preventing Eating-Related and Weight-Related Disorders is the second in a series of titles from The Community Health Systems Resource Group at The Hospital for Sick Children. This series will educate researchers, policy-makers, students, practitioners, and interested stakeholders on such topics as early intervention in psychosis, aggressive behaviour problems, eating-related disorders, and marginalized youth in educational contexts.

People who have high levels of H are sincere and modest; people who have low levels are deceitful and pretentious. The “H” in the H factor stands for “Honesty-Humility,” one of the six basic dimensions of the human personality. 

 It isn’t intuitively obvious that traits of honesty and humility go hand in hand, and until very recently the H factor hadn’t been recognized as a basic dimension of personality. But scientific evidence shows that traits of honesty and humility form a unified group of personality traits, separate from those of the other five groups identified several decades ago.

This book, written by the discoverers of the H factor, explores the scientific findings that show the importance of this personality dimension in various aspects of people’s lives: their approaches to money, power, and sex; their inclination to commit crimes or obey the law; their attitudes about society, politics, and religion; and their choice of friends and spouse. Finally, the book provides ways of identifying people who are low in the H factor, as well as advice on how to raise one’s own level of H.

Understanding and Addressing Girls’ Aggressive Behaviour Problems reflects a major shift in understanding children’s aggressive-behaviour problems. Researchers used to study what went wrong with a troubled child and needed to be fixed; we now aim to understand what is going wrong in children’s relationships that might create, exacerbate, and maintain aggressive-behaviour problems in childhood and adolescence. In this volume, leading researchers in the aggression field examine how problems develop for boys and girls in relationships and how we can help children to develop healthy relationships.
Individual chapters explore biological and social contexts, including physical health and relationship problems that might underlie the development of aggressive behaviour problems. The impact of relationships on girls’ development is illustrated to be particularly important for Aboriginal girls. Contributors discuss prevention and intervention strategies that help aggressive children build the requisite skills and relationship capacities and also shift dynamics within critical social contexts, such as the family, peer group, classroom, and school.
The support of healthy development not only of children but of their parents and other important adults in their lives, including teachers has been shown to be effective in reducing the burden of suffering associated with aggression among children and adolescents—for youth themselves as well as their families, peers, schools, communities, and society.

The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These “unlikely documents” include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres—a play, the long poem, or the short story.
Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing.
Read the chapter “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences.
The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father-daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L’Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a “schizophrenic” identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students.
Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory.
Read the chapter “Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.

Living Recovery provides critical information for practitioners and educators in mental health services about the self-described needs of young people diagnosed with mental illness. It portrays the stages of living with mental illness through the recovery model ELAR—emergence, loss, adaptation, and recovery. The author interviewed youth aged sixteen to twenty-seven in Canada, Australia, and the US, and her book relates the price of the stigma surrounding mental illness, especially for young people who are already challenged with the developmental tasks of adolescence. The text examines the youth-described “social illness” of stigma and the resulting self-marginalization they say is necessary to survive stigma and social isolation. When youth feel isolated, ignored, or shunned, the resulting shame and stress they may feel has the potential to exacerbate such illnesses as obsessive compulsive disorder, psychosis, anxiety, and/or various mood disorders.
The findings from this research anticipate and identify interventions that are useful for youth with mental illness. If programs and systems of care take into account youth stories such as those presented here, interventions will become more meaningful and more likely to address problems related to social and emotional distresses.
In charting journeys through the emergence of illness, to loss, adaptation, and recovery, the book reports on how mental illness disrupted these youths’ lives on every level, especially in the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood. But youth also describe ways in which they adapted and recovered and how they came to “own the illness” with a greater sense of agency and self-direction.

This book provides serious students of psychology, religion and mythology with a detailed account and analysis of what has been accomplished in the psychological interpretation of the Eros and Psyche myth to date.

The Eros and Psyche myth has, over the course of the twentieth century, received nearly as much attention from depth psychologists as has the Oedipus story. In their attempt to better understand this popular story, scholars have proposed various interpretations, which have generally followed either Freudian or Jungian theories about the nature of the psyche and its development.

Love and the Soul emphasizes how psychological theory determines the direction of interpretation much more than does the literary context of the myth itself. It also examines the strengths and weaknesses of these psychological interpretations (five Freudian and six Jungian) of the Eros and Psyche myth in order to lay the groundwork for an interpretation which (1) avoids the rigidity of both Freudian and Jungian dogma and (2) restores the myth to its rightful literary and religious context — something which has been ignored by most psychological interpretations.

Rarely has an author illuminated in one book an aspect of religious study with attention to so many disciplines. John Hoffman skilfully interrelates the fields of psychology, mythology, anthropology, literature, and New Testament studies to show their common use of narration techniques. Hoffman explains how the storytelling nature of myths, parables, and psychotherapy seeks to heal and to bring wholeness to both the individual and to a social grouping.

Bringing into this discussion the tension between law, the stabilizing factor of a society, and freedom, the spontaneous and creative urges that move outside of social order, Hoffman shows how rituals function to affirm the order of the culture in which they exist, yet, as they open up the realm of the imagination, they provide the possibility for disruption. For as long as fantasy is a part of narration (both in telling and hearing) the social order can be both criticized and superseded.

Hoffman clearly sets his work within the genre of Crossan, Perls, Jaffe, Turner, Grimes, Buechner, and Eliade. Carefully examining the work of Tom Driver and John Cobb, he expresses the need to go beyond traditional structures and formulations in order to move theology closer to narrative. A narrative form, Hoffman argues, can both affirm faith and invite believers to transcend its expression and break free of its strictures, providing for an ever more dynamic theology.

Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?
The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered.
Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape the memoir, a form as old as the middle ages and as young as today, into a social discourse that blends the personal with the political, the self with the significant other, literature with history, and fiction with autobiography and essay. Buss urges readers to use their reading experience to help themselves understand and write the significance of their own lives.
Repossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women’s use of a form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay. Buss demonstrates that the memoir makes its own art, not only through selective borrowing from these genres but also through the unique way that the tripartite narrative voice of the memoir constructs the personal and public experience of the memorist as significant to our cultural moment.