Review of Clinical management of memory problems.

Reviews the book, Clinical management of memory problems by Barbara A. Wilson and Nick Moffat (1984). This short and serviceable volume amalgamates a series of papers presented at the University of Nottingham, England, in 1982. Its editors have brought together contributors from both academic and clinical settings in an attempt to bridge current theoretical models of human memory with practical approaches to memory assessment and its remediation. This book offers sound guidelines for anyone working with clients who present with memory deficits secondary to cortical dysfunction. Its brevity, easy reading style, and practical approach make it a useful reference for students and clinicians alike. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical hypnosis with children.

Reviews the book, Clinical hypnosis with children by William C. Wester II and Donald J. O'Grady (see record 1991-97780-000). This edited volume by Wester and O'Grady contributes to the field by gathering a well-known group of experts to summarize briefly the application of hypnosis for various types of childhood problems. The book's goals include coverage of the variety of uses of hypnosis and hypnotherapy with children. In addition, the editors want to provide various and sometimes divergent views of hypnotherapy with children. To this end, the editors generally accomplish their goals. The range of topics covered is quite broad, and the contributors include both psychologists and physicians who use hypnosis in their clinical practices. As with many edited books the content and quality varies, but I found the book to be of generally high quality. The writing styles are diverse, yet most of the chapters are clear, concise, and highly readable. While there is no single theoretical position for the chapters, the theoretical orientation of the book is broadly psychodynamic, empirical, and cognitive. The underlying perspective on hypnosis is from a more traditional and empirical view, rather than the Ericksonian perspective. This book is written for professional psychotherapists, e.g., psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, with basic to intermediate knowledge of hypnosis. A person with background in working with adults would find this book a good introduction to working with children. Overall, the editors have done a nice job of assembling a coherent group of papers that provides the reader with an overview of the application of hypnosis with children. I recommend this book to psychotherapists interested in working with children, and it makes a useful contribution to the growing literature on hypnotherapy with children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction.

Reviews the book "Clinical versus statistical prediction," by Paul Everett Meehl (see record 1996-97896-000). Meehl attempts to plot a course to the port of valid prediction through the "rigorous" channels of statistical methods and the "sophisticated" undercurrents of clinical dynamics. Most of the book is devoted to a thoughtful but discursive analysis of the alternative strategies for prediction of statistical or actuarial methods as compared with clinical or casestudy methods. Meehl believes that much confusion could be avoided if careful distinction were made between two different uses of statistics, the types of data involved in prediction, and the methods of combining data in making predictions. Meehl does an excellent job of raising some of the basic problems and issues which have to be considered in carrying out research in this area. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical neuropsychology of intervention.

Reviews the book, Clinical neuropsycbology of intervention by Barbara Uzzell and Yigal Gross. Doctors Uzzell and Gross have performed a great service for the field of Neuropsychology by editing the volume which they entitle Clinical Neuropsychology of Intervention. They have succeeded in making the book a depiction of the state of the art of neuropsychological rehabilitation in 1986. The contributions, of uniformly high quality, are by individuals who are experienced in service delivery to the brain injured. The contributions reflect both an underlying concern with psychological theory and with principles of neuropsychology and reflect an effort by each author to analyze and codify his/her own experience so as to present it systematically to the reader. These efforts are all successful—some to such a degree that those chapters constitute superb, self-contained treatments of their topics. Surely, this coherence of approach and the high quality of the result have to reflect the skillful editing by Doctors Uzzell and Gross. The reviewer recommends this book as obligatory reading for anyone involved in the evaluation or treatment of brain damaged patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical assessment of malingering and deception, 3rd edition.

Reviews the book, Clinical assessment of malingering and deception, 3rd edition by Richard Rogers (see record 2008-09622-000). Over the past 10 years, psychologists who have been engaged in clinical assessment or evaluation have become more sensitised to the fact that client variables such as noncredible performance can substantially interfere with accurate evaluation and interpretation of obtained psychological or neuropsychological test scores. The chapters in this book clearly indicate that noncredible performance and deception are common in many assessment populations, that it is difficult if not impossible to always obtain accurate information when relying on self-report data, and that objective methods exist to enhance detection of noncredible responding. The first two chapters were written by Rogers himself and set the conceptual framework for the entire text. The book is then divided into four additional sections, with chapters provided by some of the best known names in malingering and defensiveness research. In Section II, specific diagnostic issues are considered, leading with an overview of symptoms associated with deception. Section III discusses psychometric methods to assess response styles. Section IV deals with specialised methods of detection and will likely be of interest to a very limited number of psychologists working in specific fields such as corrections or forensics. Section V deals with specialised applications, including deception in children and adolescents, forensic examinations, and assessment of law enforcement personnel. Overall, this is an excellent reference book, and it certainly provides enough specific, clinically relevant information in the four chapters that flank the book to give most clinicians a good summary of the issues, available instruments, and research findings to date. The chapters dealing with specific diagnostic issues and specialised methods are likely to be referenced heavily by those who work in these specific fields and might provide a good theoretical base for individuals still in the process of clinical training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Competency to Stand Trial.

Reviews the book, Competency to Stand Trial by Ronald Roesch and Stephen Golding (1981). Competency to Stand Trial is about the kinds of tests used by psychiatrists and other clinicians in the course of Court-ordered evaluations. The book does in fact though deal with a set of issues probably even more important than assessing insanity (as under Section 16 of the Criminal Code of Canada). Roesch and Golding examined the way in which competency, or fitness, examinations were conducted in North Carolina. Their research was set in motion when they were asked to advise on the building of new facilities for the conduct of fitness examinations. Competency to Stand Trial shows how, with careful thought and analysis, behavioural scientists can sometimes transform the nature of a problem quite fundamentally. Roesch and Golding have written an admirable book. It contains an excellent and readable summary of the legal issues around competency, impeccable data with well reasoned argument, and thoughtful, challenging suggestions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical management of substance abuse programs.

Reviews the book, Clinical management of substance abuse programs by Robert J. Craig (see record 1987-97819-000). Clinical management of substance abuse programs is a significant contribution to substance abuse program management. The author provides the program director with specific information about increasing program effectiveness. His thesis is that broad program activities have greater impact on total patient care than does any individual activity with a particular patient. The book is divided into three parts. Part I is devoted to the following sections: (a) an introduction and review of the book's contents, (b) diagnostic interviewing, and (c) psychological testing. The three chapters in Part II review general models of treatment, including multimodal, combined alcohol and drug, and treatment matching. Part III, which contains four chapters, details clinical program management activities. In this section the author offers the nuts and bolts for designing a substance abuse program based on effective evaluation and quality control. The author is successful in providing a basic text to assist clinician/managers in designing more effective treatment programs for substance abusers. I recommend this book to any professional responsible for program development in substance abuse treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical guidelines in cross-cultural mental health.

Reviews the book, Clinical guidelines in cross-cultural mental health edited by Lillian Comas-Diaz and Ezra E. H. Griffith (see record 1988-97772-000). This volume represents the latest work on psychotherapy with ethnic/racial minority populations, and was intended for mental health practitioners as well as academicians. The book is divided into three parts. The first section has six chapters addressing the role of "ethnosociocultural" factors such as ethnicity, family values, language, religion, politics, and race in the cross-cultural delivery of psychotherapeutic care. The second section focuses on clinical practice with specific ethnic/racial groups including Afro-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Southeast Asian refugees, and West Indians. A final section of one chapter by Comas-Diaz discusses the "state of the art" in cross-cultural mental health. Three factors set this book apart from previous ones on this topic: 1) devotion of an entire section to core ethnosociocultural factors; 2) use of case vignettes to illustrate important cross-cultural issues in mental health; and 3) provision of specific recommendations for the practitioner. Unfortunately, the effort falls short due to the strong academic approach to clinical issues evident throughout the book. Moreover, there was substantial variability in contributors' use of case material and provision of specific recommendations. This uneven coverage, one of the prime drawbacks of many edited volumes, may limit its appeal to practitioners. This book is an improvement over previous texts in this area, but it is by no means a clinician's guide to cross-cultural mental health because of the pervasive academic influence throughout. Consequently, there is an imbalance in favor of didactic over pragmatic approaches to cross-cultural mental health. Thus this book seems more suitable for clinicians in training than for clinicians in practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical applications of the Adult Attachment Interview.

Reviews the book, Clinical applications of the Adult Attachment Interview edited by Howard Steele and Miriam Steele (see record 2008-04549-000). Although the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), created by Mary Main and her colleagues, is among the most important research instruments in developmental and clinical psychology, the details of its administration and scoring are known only to certified coders and examples of its clinical utility are, for the everyday clinician, difficult to find. This edited volume draws the curtain far enough to reveal the major inner-workings of the interview and throws light on the penetrating ways it can inform any psychotherapy. The editors, Howard and Miriam Steele, themselves clinically minded attachment researchers and well versed in the AAI and its sister interviews, have done a remarkable job of recruiting clinicians and clinician-researchers who more than make good on the promise of the volume’s title. This volume is best suited to those already acquainted with attachment theory and the major findings of attachment research. It will help clinical graduate students tune their ears to attachment-informed ways of listening and thinking, help established clinicians attend to the nuances of linguistic structure to inform clinical understanding and intervention, and inspire researchers new to interview-based methods of investigation. Readers will not find, and the editors did not intend to include, debates on the merits of the interview’s complexity or a discussion of the much needed rapprochement between researchers who favor the AAI and researchers who rely on paper-and-pencil inventories of attachment security. The Steeles fill an critical gap in the clinical literature on attachment; outside of single chapters that give high quality but necessarily brief overviews of the AAI (e.g., Hesse, 2008; Levy & Kelly, 2009), I am not aware of another book that offers as unobstructed a view of how the AAI is conducted and coded or of the many ways the interview can be used as a clinical tool. Outside the expensive, labor-intensive AAI trainings given around the world, this volume may be as close as many of us will get to the means to appreciate, learn, and use the AAI in practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The clinician’s handbook.

Reviews the book, The clinician's handbook by Robert G. Meyer and Sarah E. Deitsch (see record 1996-97385-000). This book is an integration of a great deal of both diagnostic and clinical information concerning adult and adolescent psychopathology. It brings together a collective wealth of information about various psychological assessment tools. It also attempts to show the relevance of assessment data, both to case formulation and to treatment/intervention. Although, as the reviewer notes, there are a few expected flaws in the text, he believes that the authors should be congratulated for their superb effort to accomplish what they set out to do, which is to give a specific and concrete focus to psychopathology assessment. This book is recommended for psychotherapists, particularly those who are forensically oriented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical neurology of aging.

Reviews the book, Clinical neurology of aging, edited by Martin L. Albert (1984). This book covers the "neurology" of aging in the broadest sense of the term. The 27 chapters, written by recognized authorities in their specialties, deal with the organic bases of aging (neuroanatomy, neuropathology, neurochemistry, and neuroimmunology); the clinical neurological evaluation and the application of neurodiagnostic techniques (electroencephalography, computerized axial tomography, evoked potentials, cerebral blood flow); the neuropsychological, sensory, and motor changes associated with aging; psychiatric syndromes; rehabilitation procedures; and the most common neurological disorders encountered in the elderly patient. Both the practicing clinician and the researcher in the field of rehabilitation will find this volume to be a valuable reference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical values: Emotions that guide psychoanalytic treatment.

Reviews the book Clinical Values: Emotions That Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment (2004), by Sandra Buechler. Buechler, a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, sets out to elucidate a number of seldom spoken-about tasks of the analyst in this thoughtful and often inspiring book. Drawing on 20 years of experience as an analyst, she sheds an intimate light on the analyst's struggle against loneliness, burnout, anxiety, and outright feelings of fear and intimidation as well as on the need to remain inquisitive, interested, and purposeful. In the first chapter of her book, Buechler directly and indirectly raises some of the questions that have concerned psychoanalysis for the last 20 years. She ponders, for instance, whether there are such things as truth and reality that exist a priori and independently of what the analyst and patient "cocreate" in the consulting room. Is the analyst's knowledge an illusion that is detrimental to the goal of fostering curiosity in treatment? What is the role of theory in treatment? Buechler manages to pose these controversial questions in such a way that one can easily lose sight of what is indeed so controversial about them. This is mainly because these issues are discussed as subheadings to her stated central focus--a set of clinical values that guide or ought to guide the analyst's work. However, Buechler's recommendations for addressing these inherent challenges become a polemical and, to my mind, an equally, if not more, interesting subject of discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical Handbook of Psychotropic Drugs (13th ed.).

This annual publication (2003) updates readers about the major classes of psychotropic medications. It reviews some 14 groups of interventions: antidepressants, electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotics (neuroleptics), antiparkinsonian agents, anxiolytic agents, hypnotics/sedatives, mood stabilizers, psychostimulants, cognition enhancers, sex-drive depressants, drugs of abuse, treatment of substance use disorders, new unapproved treatment of psychiatric disorders, and herbal and natural products. Following the body of the text, there appears a Glossary, Suggested Readings, an Index of Drugs, and some helpful Patient Information Sheets. Psychotherapists will find this a useful, and state-of-the-art text. Although the information provided can be obtained through a wide range of competing sources, it is the organization, formulation, and patient information features that make this text relatively unique. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Psychological Assessment of Children.

Reviews the book, The Psychological Assessment of Children by James O. Palmer (see record 1970-20599-000). The Palmer text begins with a nod to the science-practitioner model. It is ego-oriented and depends heavily of the case history approach viewed within developmental constructs. Psychiatric taxonomy is largely avoided. The organisation of material covers 5 parts; I Hypotheses of Assessment, II Methods of Data Collection, III Procedure in Assessment, IV Analyses of the Assessment, and and V Assessment and Recommendations. The final chapters comprise a linking of assessment for psychotherapy and other kinds of intervention. Test manual kinds of materials, test norms, and scoring procedures are not covered. Nor are specific tests reviewed, the assumption being that the student will be receiving technical training concurrently. Palmer's purpose seems to be the provision of holistic kinds of conceptual frameworks within which the technician can function instead as a professional. Worth examining for class adaption. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and review of the evidence.

Reviews the book "Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and review of the evidence" by Paul E. Meehl (see record 1996-97896-000). This book talks about a continuing debate among psychologists regarding the relative accuracy and efficiency of statistical (actuarial) predictions and those made by clinicians on the basis of subjective "understanding" of individual cases. This book represents the author's first published statement of his position. In the reviewers opinion, the author has succeeded admirably. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Behavioral Assessment of Childhood Disorders.

Reviews the book, Behavioral Assessment of Childhood Disorders by Eric J. Mash and Leif G. Terdal (Eds.) (1981). Behavioral Assessment of Childhood Disorders will be the standard against which any future volumes on behavioural assessment of children will be compared. Eric Mash and Lief Terdal have covered a broad range of childhood problems in 16 chapters by well-known psychologists. The major strengths of the volume are its broad scope and the clinical and research expertise of the individual contributors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Pain and behavioral medicine: A cognitive-behavioral perspective.

Reviews the book, Pain and behavioral medicine: A cognitive-behavioral perspective by Dennis C. Turk, Donald Meichenbaum, and Myles Genest (1983). This book represents the convergence of current interest in two rapidly developing and exciting fields of endeavour for psychologists: behavioural medicine and cognitive-behavioural intervention. The book accepts and more than satisfactorily responds to three challenges: to provide professionals in the health sciences with an overview of the cognitive-behavioural perspective on human functioning; to present the rationale, development, and utilization of cognitive-behavioural techniques in the promotion of health, the prevention of disease, and the treatment of illness; and to present a systematic perspective on the management of pain, including theoretical, research, and clinical issues. The reader with a serious interest in understanding health, and practitioners devoted to enhancing health, would do well to examine this book. No caring health professional involved in pain management, whether psychologist, physician, nurse, or otherwise, should be deficient in the knowledge base and practical procedures described here. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)