Levitt's and Stephen J. Dubner's book. This is a summary of Steven D. Levitt's and Stephen J. Dubner's book. It provides a detailed and concise description of their books' content, key ideas and facts. In Think Like a Freak, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner advice how to master the economic way of thinking described in their previous bestsellers. To say it briefly, thinking like a Freak means being willing to think outside the box. The book offers advice, which may be useful to those who want to make better decisions and achieve better results when dealing with minor issues or major worldwide reforms. The kind of thinking, which is promoted in the book, is inspired by the economic approach. The economic approach is both simpler and broader than merely focusing on the economy. It claims to be independent of ideology, and it uses data in order to understand how the world works, how incentives thrive, how resources are distributed, and what prevents people from getting those resources. --------------------- Book summaries published by Brief, Concise and to the Point Publishing are designed to keep readers up to date and knowledgeable regarding new and significant books. Book summaries are perfect for people, especially busy professionals, who do not have the time to read books in their entirety. The main benefits of reading book summaries published by Brief, Concise and to the Point Publishing: 1. Our book summaries help you save your time and money. Instead of spending days or even weeks reading an important book, simply take one or two hours to read our concise book summary. It will introduce you to the book's primary content, ideas, arguments and facts. It will also help you decide whether it is worthwhile to invest your time and money in the entire book. 2. Our book summaries are truly comprehensive. Some other publishers' superficial book summaries do not exceed 15 to 20 pages, although they are presented as lengthy summaries. Our extensive book summaries include all the essential information you need to know. 3. Our books help you retain more information pertaining to the book's content. Academic studies have proven that people retain more of what they read in a summary as compared with what they remember after reading a book. Please note that according to the U.S. copyright law, the ideas and facts presented in books, as well as book titles, are not protected by copyright law.

    Futher, you will study how theories can be applied to individual therapy or counseling for common psychological disorders, such as depression and generalized anxiety disorders, as well as how they can be applied to group therapy.

    Carefully updated, it helps both students and clinicians visualize DSM-IV-TR disorders through the use of clinical vignettes. Each is followed by a discussion of the DSM-IV-TR differential diagnosis.The DSM-IV-TR(R) Casebook is highly recommended for clinicians to help them develop a deeper comprehension of all diagnostic categories.

    What is going on? Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals. Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?  This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?  By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?  In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

    "It is Dr. Sacks's gift that he has found a way to enlarge our experience and understanding of what the human is." --"The Wall Street Journal "Dubbed "the poet laureate of medicine" by "The New York Times, " Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and a mesmerizing storyteller. His empathetic accounts of his patients's lives--and wrily observed narratives of his own--convey both the extreme borderlands of human experience and the miracles of ordinary seeing, speaking, hearing, thinking, and feeling. Vintage Sacks includes the introduction and case study "Rose R." from Awakenings (the book that inspired the Oscar-nominated movie), as well as "A Deaf World" from Seeing Voices; "The Visions of Hildegard" from Migraine; excerpts from "Island Hopping" and "Pingelap" from The Island of the Colorblind; "A Surgeon's Life" from An Anthropologist on Mars; and two chapters from Sacks's acclaimed memoir Uncle Tungsten.

    It is designed to help them understand how the disorder affects their loved ones and recognize what they can do to get off the emotional roller coasters and take care of themselves.

    They can be euphoric one moment, despairing and depressed the next. There are an estimated 10 million sufferers of BPD living in America today—each displaying remarkably similar symptoms: ● a shaky sense of identity ● sudden violent outbursts ● oversensitivity to real or imagined rejection ● brief, turbulent love affairs ● frequent periods of intense depression ● eating disorders, drug abuse, and other self-destructive tendencies ● an irrational fear of abandonment and an inability to be alone For years BPD was difficult to describe, diagnose, and treat. But now, for the first time, Dr. Jerold J. Kreisman and health writer Hal Straus offer much-needed professional advice, helping victims and their families to understand and cope with this troubling,shockingly widespread affliction.

    Significant loss and unresolved grief are primary underpinnings of anxiety, something that grief expert Claire Bidwell Smith discovered in her own life and in her practice with her therapy clients. Now, using research and real life stories, Smith breaks down the physiology of anxiety, giving you a concrete foundation of understanding in order to help you heal. Starting with the basics of What Is Anxiety? and What Is Grief? and moving to concrete approaches such as Making Amends, Taking Charge, and Retraining Your Brain, Anxiety takes a big step beyond Elisabeth KüRoss's widely accepted five stages to unpack everything from our age-old fears about mortality to the bare vulnerability a loss can make us feel. With concrete tools and coping strategies for panic attacks, getting a handle on anxious thoughts, and more, Smith bridges these two emotions in a way that is deeply empathetic and eminently practical.

    When we are stuck, talk therapy often fails to produce the needed connections between the old emotional memory and a more grounded view of reality, and medications can have dire side effects and limited effectiveness.   In Getting Past Your Past, Francine Shapiro, who created EMDR (the “eye movement” therapy), opens the door to a scientifically proven mode of treatment used by thousands of clinicians worldwide. The book offers practical procedures that demystify the process and empower readers looking to break free from emotional roadblocks. Shapiro explains the brain science in layman’s terms and provides simple exercises that readers can do at home to achieve real change.   “I always came out of my EMDR therapist’s office reeling (in a good way); and the things I learnedhave stayed with me and enriched my conscious mind. It’s a powerful process. I recommend it.”—from The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

    When you go to the health club, you notice how buff the woman to the left is and how skinny the woman to the right is. And when you go out, you see the guys flocking to talk with certain women and wonder if your looks stack up to theirs. When you get dressed in the morning, do you worry about whether your jeans are flattering? Do you think about who you are going to see when you decide how to do your hair? When you eat a meal, do you think about those magazine models again? Most women do. And they are buying into a lie. In this book Michelle Graham reveals how easy it is to fall into the trap of viewing your body through the lens of culture rather than through the eyes of God. She helps you understand that these are not the things that God wants you to dwell on. And these are not the true qualities of beauty. As you read this book you will discover that beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and colors, and it cannot be airbrushed or faked. In these pages you will discover the true secrets of a positive body image.

    Part memoir and part self-help guide, this very personal story traces the private struggles that Ellis faced from early childhood to well into his adult life. Whether you are already familiar with Ellis’s many best-selling psychology books or are discovering his work for the first time, you will gain many insights into how to deal with your problems by seeing how Ellis learned to cope with his own serious challenges.In his early life, Ellis was faced with a major physical disability, chronic nephritis, which plagued him from age five to nine and led to hospitalization. This experience then caused the emotional reaction of separation anxiety. At this time he also suffered from severe, migraine-like headaches, which persisted into his forties. Later in life, he realized that some of his emotional upset was the result of initially taking parental neglect too seriously. Active and energetic by nature, he gradually learned that the best way to cope with any problem, physical or emotional, was to stop "catastrophizing" and to do something to correct it.As Ellis points out in all of his work, when faced with adversity, we must realize that we have a real choice, either to think rationally about the problem or to react irrationally. The first choice leads to healthy consequences—normal emotions such as sorrow, regret, frustration, or annoyance, which are justifiable reactions to troubling situations. The second choice leads to the unhealthy consequences of anxiety, depression, rage, and low self-esteem. When we recognize irrational beliefs as such, we must then use our reason to dispute their validity. Ellis goes on to describe how these techniques helped him to cope with many other adult emotional problems, including failure in love affairs, shame, anger, distress over his parents’ divorce, stress from others’ reactions to his atheistic convictions, and upset due to his attitudes about academic and professional setbacks.Honest and unflinching yet always positive and forward-looking, Ellis demonstrates how to gain and grow from trying experiences through rational thinking.

    Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us. Challenging the Freudian view that bodily disorders originate and progress in the mind, Orbach argues that we should look at self-mutilation, obesity, anorexia, and plastic surgery on their own terms, through a reading of the body itself. Incorporating the latest research from neuropsychology, as well as case studies from her own practice, she traces many of these fixations back to the relationship between mothers and babies, to anxieties that are transferred unconsciously, at a very deep level, between the two. Orbach reveals how vulnerable our bodies are, how susceptible to every kind of negative stimulus--from a nursing infant sensing a mother's discomfort to a grown man or woman feeling inadequate because of a model on a billboard. That vulnerability makes the stakes right now tremendously high.In the past several decades, a globalized media has overwhelmed us with images of an idealized, westernized body, and conditioned us to see any exception to that ideal as a problem. The body has become an object, a site of production and commerce in and of itself. Instead of our bodies making things, we now make our bodies. Susie Orbach reveals the true dimensions of the crisis, and points the way toward healing and acceptance.

    The best-seller that helps you say: "I just said 'no' and I don't feel guilty!" Are you letting your kids get away with murder? Are you allowing your mother-in-law to impose her will on you? Are you embarrassed by praise or crushed by criticism? Are you having trouble coping with people? Learn the answers in "When I Say No, I Feel Guilty," the best-seller with revolutionary new techniques for getting your own way.

    Written by well-known and respected scholars, the book, in nine core chapters, provides an introduction to a set of disorders along with overviews of current research on etiology, treatment and prevention. Prior chapters give a context for the integration of Christianity and the scientific study of psychopathology, and articulate integrative themes discussed throughout the book, providing a foundation for the concluding vision for Christian health professionals and the church. This is a unique and valuable resource for Christians studying psychology and counseling, or providing counseling services, pastoral care, Christian healing ministries or spiritual direction. Though fully capable of standing on its own, it is also a useful companion volume to Modern Psychotherapies by Stanton L. Jones and Richard E. Butman.

    Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five.An internationally acknowledged authority on depressive illnesses, Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind. It is critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand this tragic epidemic.