Search

The article reviews the book "The Paper Office: Forms, Guidelines, and Resources to Make Your Practice Work Ethically, Legally, and Profitably," Fourth edition, by Edward L. Zuckerman.

Reviews the book "I Am Not Your Victim," by B. Sipe and E.J. Hall.

This paper discusses the Taiwanese woman poet Ye Hong 葉紅's poems about death, attempting to articulate her perspective on death and what it means in her poetry. Based on her poetry linking psychiatric treatment with death writing, this paper further explains how the poet employs the imagery of death and poetry writing as an escape from life crisis. In the case of Ye Hong, literature as psychiatric treatment did serve to soothe her melancholia and prevent her from losing her capability of speaking. At the same time, she also attempted to save herself by writing about death, that is, by sublimating the death drive by incessantly refashioning the signs of death in her poems. Ye’s death, however, indicates the impossibility of redemption through writing: poetry can never be a substitute for medical treatment. Nevertheless, considering the eternal value of literary work, we may conclude that literature is Ye’s afterlife, through which readers can overcome her physical death by returning again and again to her narrative of death before she died. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people use religious beliefs and practices to cope with stressful life events and derive peace of mind and purpose in life. The goal of this paper was to systematically review the recent psychological literature to assess the role of religion in mental health outcomes. A comprehensive literature search was conducted using medical and psychological databases on the relationship between religiosity and mental health. Seventy-four articles in the English and Arabic languages published between January 2000 and March 2012 were chosen. Despite the controversial relationship between religion and psychiatry, psychology, and medical care, there has been an increasing interest in the role which spirituality and religion play in mental health. The findings of past research showed that religion could play an important role in many situations, as religious convictions and rules influence the believer's life and health care. Most of the past literature in this area reported that there is a significant connection between religious beliefs and practices and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the book "Community Support System and Mental Health: Practice, Policy, and Research," edited by David E. Blegel and Arthur J. Naparstek. This is a collection of nineteen papers originally prepared for two conferences in 1980. The major premise underlying these studies is that since the mental health needs in the U.S. cannot be met by professionals alone, and since government agencies and programs are limited and inadequate for meeting those needs, people will have to help themselves, primarily through "community support systems." The distribution of the papers have been made in four parts: theory and research about community support systems, examples of programmatic interventions which utilize community support systems, analyses of the relationships between professionals and community support systems, and the policy implications of community support systems. The theoretical papers reflect the conceptual confusion which generally troubles the study of community support systems. The editors argue in their introductory chapter that a "catchments" area is not a community and that the neighborhood is the proper focus for studying community support systems. Other papers circumvent the issue by focusing on self-help and mutual support groups, as kinds of communities, without exploring the relationships between individuals who share specific common interest and others who are related to them, regardless of their physical or social propinquity.

Research on the confluence of culture and mental health has grown dramatically in the past three decades. However, this line of research has focused almost entirely on western populations and largely neglected people from other regions. Western conceptualizations of positive functioning cannot be generalized to the Muslim populations before indigenous investigations are undertaken. This paper looks at the Muslim understanding of a good life. A brief review of the conceptualizations of happiness in the West is presented first. Next, a selection of Islamic teachings relevant to the concept of happiness is compared and contrasted with scholarship originating from the West. It is hoped that this theoretical analysis will stimulate more informed empirical research among Muslim psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated the prospective predictors of mental health after breast cancer diagnosis among mid-aged Australian women (initially aged 45–50 years). Two waves of data collected 2 years apart from a longitudinal population-based survey of 12,177 women identified a group of 63 women who reported onset of BC between T1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2). The measures of interest in the current analysis were the sub-scales of the SF-36, a standard self-report measure of health-related quality of life, and three demographic variables (having a partner, speaking English at home, and having paid employment). Multivariate regression analysis with T2 mental health as the outcome variable revealed that both T1 mental health and bodily pain contributed significantly to mental health at T2, with mental health being the greatest contributor. It was concluded that the experience of breast cancer is not damaging to mental health per se, but such a life stressor is likely to impact most on the mental health of women who already had less robust mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]