His search took him to Africa, India, and East Asia, to the National Institutes of Mental Health, and to the mountains of Appalachia. What he discovered is both surprising and controversial: There is no true increase in autism. Grinker shows that the identification and treatment of autism depends on culture just as much as on science. As more and more cases of autism are documented, doctors are describing the disorder better, school systems are coding it better--and children are benefiting. Filled with moving stories and informed by the latest science, Unstrange Minds is unlike any other book on autism. It is a powerful testament to a father's quest for the truth, and is urgently relevant to anyone whose life is touched by one of history's most puzzling disorders.

    A new mother is admitted with incessant visions of harming her child. A recent graduate, dressed in a tunic and declaring that love emanates from everything around him, is brought to A&E by his alarmed girlfriend. These are among the patients new physician Christine Montross meets during rounds at her hospital’s locked inpatient ward – and who we meet as she struggles to understand the mysteries of the mind, most especially when the tools of modern medicine are failing us. Beautifully written and deeply felt, Falling into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry and a moving reminder, in the words of the New York Times, of 'our fragile, shared humanity'

    Basic Writings offers a full range of this profound and controversial thinker's writings in one volume, including:The Origin of the Work of ArtThe introduction to Being and TimeWhat Is Metaphysics?Letter on HumanismThe Question Concerning TechnologyThe Way to LanguageThe End of Philosophy

    The authors also make an important contribution to the interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. They show that it is concerned not with the dead, but with the living. The last section of the manual provides instructions for an actual psychedelic session, under adequate safeguards.The authors were engaged in a program of experiments with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University until sensational national publicity unfairly concentrating on student interest in the drugs, led to the suspension of the experiments. Since then, the authors have continued their work without academic auspices.

    Argues that mistranslation has distorted Freud's work in English and led students to see a system intended to cooperate flexibly with individual needs as a set of rigid rules to be applied by external authority.

    Beyond the shallow waters of new-age, "law of attraction" and conventional motivational psychology there is a deep well from which you derive unbending determination and strength. That source is within you and can be awakened to achieve anything. The Reality Creation Technique is the most speedily effective method to help you make your dreams come true.

    An important feature of the book is the large number of articles on topics of mental life, in which well-known writers discuss subjects in which they have a particular expertise. Noam Chomsky writes on his own theory of language, Idries Shah on Sufism, John Bowlby on attachment theory, B.F. Skinner on behaviorism, Oliver Sacks on nothingness, A.J. Ayer on philosophical views of the relation between mind and body, and R.D. Laing on interpersonal experience. The editor, Richard Gregory, contributes entries on aesthetics, phrenology, physiognomy, and illusions of perception. The Companion includes entries on such everyday events as sleep, humor, forgetting, and hearing, as well as specialized topics such as bilingualism, jet-lag, military incompetence, computer chess, and animal magnetism. What can, and all too often does, go wrong with the mind is also covered--many forms of mental illness are explored, as well as mental handicap, brain damage, and neurological disorders. Perception and the ways in which our senses are often deceived are treated in full, as are elements of personal development and learning, and the puzzling world of parapsychology with its altered states of consciousness, out-of-body experiences, and extra-sensory perception. The workings of the nervous system are explained in a special tutorial article. The text is supplemented by brief definitions of specialist terms and by biographies of major figures who have contributed to our understanding of the mind--individuals as varied as Plato, Johannes Kepler, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Alan Turing. The entries are arranged alphabetically and, following the style of other recent Companions, are linked by a network of helpful cross-references. The 160 illustrations have been carefully chosen to amplify the text, while specialist bibliographies provide suggestions for further reading.

    Millions of patients are now routinely being given prescriptions for a wide range of drugs including Ritalin, Prosac, Zoloft and related drugs which can be harmful to the brain. A previous generation of patients would have had a course of psychotherapy without brain–damaging chemicals. Glasser explains the wide implications of this radical change in treatment and what can be done to counter it.

    Maslow was one of the foremost spokespersons of humanistic psychology. In The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature, an extension of his classic Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow explores the complexities of human nature by using both the empirical methods of science and the aesthetics of philosophical inquiry. With essays on biology, synergy, creativity, cognition, self-actualization, and the hierarchy of needs, this posthumous work is a wide-ranging synthesis of Maslow's inspiring and influential ideas.

    In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist

    In AWAKENING THE BUDDHIST HEART Surya Das shows you how to reach inward and outward. By developing spiritual intelligence, a sense of compassion that helps us be more sensitive, more aware of our own feelings and the feelings of those around us, we become more intuitive; we relate better and love better. Cultivating spiritual intelligence and learning how to connect will improve our capacity for intimacy, making us better mates, friends, parents, and coworkers; it helps all of us to become more giving and brings us fulfillment, meaning, and love. With tremendous insight he explores specific ways in which we can more fruitfully relate to our own experiences as well as each other in today's fast-paced, complicated, and often confusing world.

    In this briefer version, the authors explain abnormal psychology in the most modern, scientifically valid method for studying abnormal psychology. Through this integrative approach, students learn that psychological disorders are rooted in multiple factors: biological, psychological, cultural, social, familial, and even political. Conversational writing style, consistent pedagogy, video clips of real clients (located on the accompanying free Abnormal Psychology Live 2.5 CD-ROM), and real case profiles - 95 percent from the authors' own case files - provide a realistic context for the scientific findings of the book, and ensure that readers never lose sight of the fact that beyond the DSM-IV-TR criteria, the theories, and the research are real people. With this text, students can take advantage of Abnormal PsychologyNow, our web-based, intelligent study system that, by using online diagnostic pre- and post-tests, helps students prioritize their study time by creating personalized study plans that focus only the sections in which they experienced difficulty.

    Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

    Erickson's theories in practice, through a series of case studies covering the kinds of problems that are likely to occur at various stages of the human life cycle. The results Dr. Erickson achieves sometimes seem to border on the miraculous, but they are brought about by a finely honed technique used by a wise, intuitive, highly trained psychiatrist-hypnotist whose work is recognized as a major contribution to the field.

     Depression isn't just sadness. It is emptiness, it is misery. It is pain and nothingness at once. When you are truly depressed you lack the ability or will to cheer yourself up. No one just “has depression.” You suffer from it. Even with all our scientific advances, depression remains one of the most mysterious mental illnesses. Anti-depressants don’t work for everyone just like meditation and vacations don’t work for many others. Ayurvedic and yogic texts dating as back as 5000 years called depression, vishada, a toxic state of mind. In this profoundly insightful work, Om Swami categorizes depression into three types to help you see how a different approach is needed to cure each type. Beautifully woven with soul-stirring case-studies and yogic wisdom, you will gain a new perspective on depression and sadness.