Book Reviews

As part of the “Theories of Psychotherapy Series” from the American Psychological Association (APA), this book focuses the components and benefits of brief therapy. Intended for clinicians, Levenson’s book is informative and instructive as it is paired with a companion video that demonstrates the treatment. The brevity and organization make this book helpfully simple and user-friendly. Levenson utilizes tables, bulleted lists, and other visuals alongside her well-researched writing to clearly present this treatment as a viable tool for therapists.

Meeting the Needs of Parents Pregnant and Parenting After Perinatal Loss offers a supportive framework that integrates continuing bonds and attachment theories to support prenatal parenting at each stage of pregnancy. Giving insight into how a parent’s world view of a pregnancy may have changed following a loss, readers are provided with tools to assist parents as they explore pregnancy (conception, gestation, labor and birth) once again.

Kamamalani hopes to create a ‘pregnant pause’ for conscious decision-making with a glimpse of the local and global implications.

Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids: For Therapists, Caregivers, and Yoga Teachers combines yoga practices and psychological science to inform readers on the use of a yoga practice to aid in the treatment of and care for traumatized children. Unlike typical yoga decks, the Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids is trauma informed and somatically focused.

Kamalamani invites you to join her in celebrating the arrival of her newly-born book, Other Than Mother: Choosing Childlessness with Life in Mind, at her book launch, April 15, 2016 in Bristol, UK. Readers' comments include: "a truly beautiful book," "touching on issues close to the heart", "a timely, compassionate, skillful guide."

To better understand mental illness, psychiatrists have in the past looked at mental illness via a medical model. However, in The New Mind-Body Science of Depression, Vladimir Maletic and Charles Raison claim that we oversimplify major depression by looking at it as a discrete illness. As a result, we overlook the significance of research that doesn’t support that view. They suggest that the answers to many of our questions about major depression can be found by analyzing and integrating information we already have, but in the past ignored. They seek to map out how we came to view major depression as a discrete illness and provide evidence against that view. By doing so, they demonstrate that by sticking to misconceptions about mental illness, we are oblivious to important information that can provide some of the answers we’ve been searching for.

In 2018, one block away from my university dorm, a student committed suicide. His head was in a plastic bag when his roommate walked in and found him dead. Rumors were flying around: victim was an Indian. No, he was an African. Wasn’t he Chinese? Rumors guessed about potential death causes, and one important factor was loneliness. Loneliness has become a crucial problem in contemporary societies, and human connection in social settings help us heal both physically and mentally. Such is the theme of the book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Mindfulness is trending. It’s been on the forefront of conversations in terms of Western therapeutic methodologies since Jon Kabat Zinn integrated it into his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) in the early 1980s. Today, mindfulness practices are at the heart of many psychotherapeutic approaches such as: mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT); acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT); dialectical behavior therapy (DBT); mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP); mindfulness-based trauma therapy (MBTT); and mindfulness-based eating awareness training (MB-EAT). The word itself, however, is often confused. Its meaning subjectively associated with who or what entity is promoting its use. There’s clearly a difference between Eastern approaches to meditation and mindfulness and the current Western emphasis. With the proliferation of modalities integrating components of meditation and mindfulness practice, this book is a welcome addition to Hogrefe’s Advances in Psychotherapy: Evidence Based Practice Series—noted as Volume 37.

I’ve encountered Stanley Keleman’s work many times during my transition from teacher to therapist. And, I can honestly say I always walk away with a deeper sense of me in my entirety, me as embodied energy in human form, shaped as much by thought and reflection as act and reaction. An awareness lingers beyond the momentary meeting that tugs at the corners of my existence as if saying, come on, wake up now, be present in this body of yours and let it inform you just as you inform it.

Deborah Gray has written a compelling and easy to follow book to educate therapists on how to strengthen the quality of attachments when working with clients struggling with a variety of attachment difficulties. The book is geared towards therapists looking to learn more about attachment.