Book Reviews

In Breakthrough Moments in Arts-Based Psychotherapy Aileen Webber shares her personal journey to discover what might be happening during pivotal "break through" moments in psychotherapy and demonstrates their importance for clients' change processes.

The Human Elements of Psychotherapy is unique in its call for the rebirth of psychotherapy as a nonmedical procedure. David N. Elkins, Ph.D., experienced clinician and professor, cautions that a medical approach, which has long been accepted as the dominant paradigm in psychotherapy, is not the appropriate model when it comes to psychological healing.

For many it can be easy to harshly judge the person sitting on the street corner asking for change. Perhaps we might believe they are taking up too much sidewalk space or too much space in general. So, we step over them without stopping. Psychoanalyst and poet, Merle Molofsky makes us stop before we judge. In this visceral piece of poetry, she asks important questions about psychoanalysis, life, death, sex, love and violence. Her exceptionally engrossing writing style takes us onto the streets and in the presence of her characters. As if we stand face-to-face with the burdens and torments of each person we encounter, we come to realize our own connections to it all. She delves into topics that are still relevant today including topics of greed, drug addiction, heartbreak, loneliness and feelings of hopelessness and depression.

While clinical supervision is collectively considered a necessary and critical process in producing quality psychotherapy, there seems to be a dearth of consolidated instruction for those educating or practicing it. Noticing this, editors Hanna Levenson and Arpana G. Iman have produced a series organizing what they call a “dream team” of eleven experts in their respected fields. The two have created a multi volume Clinical Supervision Essentials, allowing for direct and concise reference for educators and practitioners. In this volume, John C. Norcross and Leah M. Popple tackle a matter near and deep to their hearts and professional work—the supervision of integrative psychotherapy.

Resolving Yesterday: First Aid for Stress and Trauma with TTT is designed to teach the Trauma Tapping Technique (TTT), a stress management and coping tool that can be performed on the self and others. It is written to be as accessible as possible so that the technique can reach people of disparate levels of education, experience, and language.

With increased efforts to reduce stigma and approach mental health care from a more personalized perspective, Same Time Next Week comes at a critical moment in the transformation of psychotherapeutic practices from the clinical to a more humanized model. Offering an intimate look into a world that, until recently, has remained largely hidden behind closed doors and hushed tones, the eighteen stories comprising this anthology are deeply personal, rich and thorough in their narrative structures without the sterile feel of the traditional case study. In their exploration of a wide variety of mental illnesses including (but not limited to) depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, schizophrenia, and eating disorders, these stories are distinct in that many are written by mental health professionals who have, themselves, experienced mental illness and therefore have first-hand knowledge of the trials and tribulations of recovery.

We are living amidst an unprecedented global crisis with men, women, and children fleeing war, violence, persecution, torture, poverty, discrimination and exclusion only to face more of the same when they arrive betwixt and between—there are few safe places to call home. They leave cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment and punishment only to be exposed and often victimized further while traveling toward longed for international protection and services. These people need our help. They deserve our attention. They’ve witnessed and survived atrocities so heart wrenching I can’t bear to write about them in detail. Thankfully clinicians are responding. People like Aida Alayarian, MD are providing services to this vastly under-served client population.

Doctors generally begin their journey as eager medical students determined to change the world one patient at a time. With intelligence, compassion, and a desire to help others, medical students muster up enough drive to fight through medical school and residency, accepting the hours of work, sleepless nights, and giant holes left in their bank account in pursuit of what they believe to be a worthwhile, fulfilling profession both morally and economically. However, in Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, Sandeep Jauhar suggests that it’s difficult to maintain this view within the current medical climate because it’s dominated by the government and large corporations set out to generate income, even if it’s at patients’ expense. In this powerful and thought-provoking memoir, Jauhar utilizes case studies and anecdotes as he reveals his journey as a doctor facing what he refers to as “the midlife crisis in American medicine” and his attempts to understand why “medicine today is as fraught as it’s ever been” (15).

Armstrong’s compassion and astuteness in Rethinking Trauma Treatment sets this scholastic work apart from the current literature on trauma treatment. Armstrong is a stellar writer, both in an academic and a narrative sense, educating the reader while simultaneously arousing feelings of empathy towards the individuals she describes. She presents essential facts in a comprehensive manner; because of her compendious writing style, readers can focus on the book’s content rather than thoughts wandering in their mind.

Becoming Us is written in a first-person familiar voice— it reads as if you are sitting with Elly, sharing stories over a cup of tea. It is an easy-to-access resource for therapists and laypersons alike. Drawing from current research and psychotherapeutic theories, Taylor writes with a simplicity that gets to the heart of ordinary experience.