Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts

42% Off Discounts: Special Prices for Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder Review

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder

Are you looking to buy Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder. check out the link below:

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Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder Review

I don't know how Randi Kreger and Paul Mason did it, but they have made a singular contribution to the world with their web site and with the publication of this life-saving book. Please allow me to post this from the book for anyone looking for help in or out of a bad situation right now:
Predictable Stages: People who love someone with BPD seem to go through similar stages. The longer the relationship has lasted, the longer each stage seems to take. Although these are listed in the general order in which people go through them, most people move back and forth among different stages.
Confusion Stage. This generally occurs before a diagnosis of BPD is known. Non-BPs struggle to understand why borderlines sometimes behave in ways that seem to make no sense. They look for solutions that seem elusive, blame themselves, or resign themselves to living in chaos. Even after learning about BPD, it can take non-BPs weeks or months to really comprehend on an intellectual level how the BP is personally affected by this complex disorder. It can take even longer to absorb the information on an emotional level.
Outer-Directed Stage. In this stage, non-borderlines turn their attention toward the person with the disorder, urging them to seek professional help, attemping to get them to change, and trying their best not to trigger problematic behavior. People at this stage usually learn all they can about BPD in an effort to understand and empathize with the person they care about. It can take nopn-BPs a long time to acknowledge feelings of anger and grief--especially when the BP is a parent or child. Anger is an extremely common reaction, even though most non-BPs understand on an intellectual level that BPD is not the borderline's fault. Yet because anger seems to be an inappropriate response to a situation that may be beyond the borderline's control, non-BPs often suppress their anger and instead experience depression, hopelessness, and guilt. The chief tasks for non-BPs in this stage include acknowledging and dealing with their own emotions, letting BPs take responsibility for their own actions, and giving up the fantasy that the BP will behave as the non-BP would like them to.
Inner-Directed Stage. Eventually, non-BPs look inward and conduct an honest apparaisal of themselves. It takes two people to have a relationship, and the goal for non-BPs in this stage is to better understand their role in making the relationship what it now is. The objective here is not self-recrimination, but insight and self-discovery.
Decision-Making Stage. Armed with knowledge and insight, non-BPs struggle to make decisions about the relationship. This stage can often take months or years. Non-BPs in this stage need to clearly understand their own values, beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. For example, one man with a physically violent borderline wife came from a conservative family that strongly disapprove of divorce. His friends counseled him to separate from her, but he felt unable to do so because of his concern about how his family would react. You may find that your beliefs and values have served you well throughout your life. Or you may find that you inherited them from your family without determining whether or not they truly reflect who you are. Either way, it is important to be guided by your OWN values--not someone else's.
Resolution Phase. In this final stage, non-BPs implement their decisions and live with them. Depending upon the type of relationship, some non-BPs may, over time, change their minds many times and try different alternatives.
And:
....When it comes to chosen relationships, we found that the BP's willingness to admit they had a problem and seek help was by far the determining factor as to whether the couple stayed together or not....
If you are looking at this right now, know that you are not alone. There are countless others who understand all you have been through for nothing. Get on the non-BP mailing list at Randi Kreger's site and buy this book NOW. It can and will save your life, whatever you decide.

Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder Overview



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30% Off Discounts: Best Buy for Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR Review

Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR

Are you looking to buy Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR. check out the link below:

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Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR Review

This is a modest little book that you can fit into your pocket but it does everything that its big brother (the much more expensive, full version of the DSM IV-TR) does -- at half the price and with greater ease of use. While the unabridged DSM IV is pretty much a textbook of psychiatry, minus only treatment recommendations, this abridgement unpretentiously lists just the diagnostic categories and the relevent (concisely phrased) criteria. Professionals will find it a handy source of symptoms and diagnosis for insurance purposes. Non-professionals will find it usable for the purpose of diagnosing themselves, their spouse, their parents and problematic friends.

Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria from DSM-IV-TR Overview


The Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria From DSM-IV-TR is a handy, low priced companion to the ultimate psychiatric reference, DSM-IV-TR. It includes all the diagnostic criteria from DSM-IV-TR in an easy-to-use, paperback format.

In making DSM-IV diagnosis, clinicians and researchers may find it convenient to consult the Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria From DSM-IV-TR, a pocket sized book that contains the classification, the diagnosis criteria, and a listing of the most important conditions to be considered in a differential diagnosis for each category.


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40% Off Discounts: Lowest Price The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide Review

The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide

Are you looking to buy The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide. check out the link below:

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The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide Review

Some persons with BPD really cannot use therapy very well, and in many parts of the country--outside the NYC and San Francisco and a couple of other major urban centers--it is hard to find therapists who really know how to work with borderlines. Indeed, many therapists don't even recognize BPD when it's right in front of them, especially if the borderline is talented (as so many are) at knowing what the therapist wants to see in order to think well of him or her. Especially when a very smart BPD, having spent a lifetime at pleasing authority figures and cajoling them into the role of caretaker, encounters a rather less smart therapist, the stage is set for a folie a deux, with the therapist ratifying the patient's pathology and falling into something like the role of worshipful caretaker.
Thus, self-study is sometimes the best route for the BPD who is serious about getting better.
Self-study is always helpful for the BPD, even the BPD who has a savvy therapist--that is, a therapist who does not want to be a hero or the sole source of help. (If your therapist doesn't like the idea of your doing self-guided study, run.) For that purpose, too, this book is excellent.
The authors have constructed some absolutely brilliant exercises, and they guide you through the kind of structured work that BPD's need in order to acquire inner order in place of their terrified chaos.
If you're a therapist who works with BPD's, look at this book as something you might want to suggest that your patients buy and use in conjunction with therapy. If you are, or have reason to suspect, you suffer BPD, have a look--especially if therapy hasn't worked so well for you.
In my experience as a therapist, I found that patients with BPD are often the most intelligent, gifted, and tragically damaged of patients--but that precisely because their inner lives are so chaotic, they are better able to acquire good structure than "more functional" patients who had well-developed maladaptive structures already in place. Taking apart a long-reinforced structure is very hard, while building from chaos is, in a sense, free of that task. This book can help with finding authentic structure, in an autonomous process that minimizes some of the dangers of BPD-in-therapy.
I have come to believe that two things, not taught in textbooks, indicate whether a BPD can get well: courage and a good heart. If you have those things, you should never let anyone, therapist or otherwise, discourage you from the path to a whole, integrated life. If you have those, buy this book at help yourself toward a life free of the horrors of your early days.

The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders : An Interactive Self-Help Guide Overview



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43% Off Discounts: Best Price An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Review

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

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An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Review

Over the past 20 years I've had several friends who suffered from manic-depressive illnesses. It's abundantly clear to me that the disease is primarily biochemical and "not their fault." But I had trouble understanding why these people refused to take their medication (or stopped taking it after they started) and otherwise engaged in massive denial. Jamison's frank and well-written book was a revelation: now I feel I have a better sense of the seductiveness of mania, and why creative, intelligent people are often willing to risk the lows of their illness for the sake of the highs. As Jamison points out emphatically, however, the long-term effects of bipolar disorder can be devastating mentally and physically (not to mention the financial and personal fallout) -- hence her crusade to understand the basis of the illness, and learn how to fine-tune the medication so that the sufferer achieves equilibrium without deadening the sensitivity and creativity that often accompany this disease. I'd already read "Night Falls Fast," which is also excellent, but this book set out the personal story behind Jamison's research interests. While she insists that love alone won't cure the disease, it's also clear that, without the love of her loyal friends, this intelligent, talented, and articulate woman might never have made it through the more difficult years, let alone become a respected authority in her profession. Anyone who suffers from bipolar disorders, and those who love them, should read this book.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Overview



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Best Buy for Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Open Road) Review

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Open Road)

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Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Open Road) Review

William Styron is perhaps best known for his bestselling novel, Sophie's Choice, which was converted to screenplay and released as an Academy award-winning motion picture starring Meryl Streep. Many critics acknowledged Styron's seemingly natural ability to evoke a sense of bitter, submerged despair through subtle understatement. The reviewers who lauded his work had no way of predicting that Styron would eventually become afflicted with a more personal misery, a depression so severe it would drive him to suicidal obsession.
Styron's harrowing struggle with clinical depression is the subject of his non-fiction bestseller, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Vintage Books, 1992). In a mercifully brief 84 pages, Styron eloquently demonstrates how the most brutal and debilitating stages of psychotic depression often hurl patients into an existential nightmare from which the only perceived escape is death (and according to Styron, this misperception constitutes one common, potentially lethal distortion of thought in depressed patients).
Darkness Visible opens with a pointed epigraph from the book of Job. This reflects Styron's perception that like Job's trials, depressed patients are beset by something inexplicable and powerful that threatens to destroy the fruits of their life and labor, the relationships they hold dear, and their very understanding of spirituality. Like Job, depressed patients struggle to find cosmological meaning in their suffering. And like Job, depressed patients who petition God to provide this meaning for them may only receive partial answers or worse yet, a silence that reverberates from an expansive, ominous void.
For people who have never experienced the devastating depths of major clinical depression, it may be difficult to empathize with the life and death struggle these patients wage from within the depths of their spirits. Well-meaning friends and family members may mistakenly attempt to encourage the depressed patient by offering preachy platitudes and pleas that lack depth of perception and compassion, such as, "Life is hard sometimes, you can't let it get you down," or "It can't be as bad as you think," or "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," or "Everybody gets the blues from time to time." These mistaken "helpers" often confuse clinical depression for situational depression (which is less debilitating, usually temporary, and often explicable through environmental factors, such as the recent death of a loved one). For professional caregivers and loved ones who may be struggling with their own responses to a patient's depression, Darkness Visible provides invaluable personal insights, and therefore plays a significant role in dismantling those experiential barriers that allow the "healthy" to separate themselves from the "sick."
Depression is an insidious disease. It gradually robs patients of their ability to experience pleasure. The insidious disease launches an attack on biochemical, cognitive, and emotive aspects of being. Depression may even manifest as a spiritual crisis, as it deteriorates a patient's ability to experience meaning in life. Styron conveys this quality of depression through dreamlike trains of thought reminiscent of Franz Kafka's fiction.
The disease invades the delicate, temporal realm of the empirical and sensual. The subjective lens of the depressed patient distorts shades of vivid color, fading them to washed-out grays and browns. Sensitivity to touch is often drastically reduced, and many depressed patients describe a sensation of feeling like they are enmeshed in gauze, mummified, unable to touch the world, others, or even themselves. Styron describes an associated sense of "drowning" or "suffocation."
Interpretation of sensation is another factor in depression. A warm home is perceived as a cold prison. The softness of a comfortable bed is experienced as the earthen padding of a silent, beckoning grave. And in William Styron's case, an internationally prestigious award ceremony may become an arduous exercise in endurance.
Depression assaults the emotive experiences of patients, as joyous and even celebratory events are transformed into harrowing exercises in futile endurance. In the opening of Darkness Visible, Styron describes his journey to Paris, where he was scheduled to receive a much-coveted award for his lifetime literary achievements. Despite the immense prestige and recognition, Styron was unable to enjoy the experience, and nearly collapsed in exhaustion and stupor before the conclusion of the ceremony. Worse yet, Styron is befuddled by the inexplicable nature of his gloom. He can find no demonstrable cause for his catastrophic reaction to this pinnacle event.
Depression is a psychiatric disease with social implications. When a patient goes through a sustained period of depression, well-loved friends and family members can become alien and suspect. This is compounded by the frustration of loved ones who genuinely wish for the depression to cease and for life to resume as "normal." These loved ones may add insult to injury by offering emotional encouragement that lacks empathetic understanding. When a loved one tells a depressed patient to "get over it", the effect is similar to a situation in which a gym coach screams the words, "Walk it off, sissy!" to his lead athlete, who happens to be nursing a compound fracture.
Styron makes no pretense of being a qualified physician, but he does recommend that clinically depressed patients exercise caution when utilizing pharmaceutical remedies. He focuses his concern on Halcion, a benzodiazepine that has been correlated with anxiety, amnesia, delusions, hostility, and suicidal ideations. Styron adds his name to the list of critics who claim that Halcion may exacerbate depressive symptoms in some patients, essentially reducing the therapeutic process to a cynical game of psychiatric Russian Roulette in which the only guaranteed winners are the pharmaceutical companies and their stockholders.
While medication can provide short-term relief from depressive symptoms, it should never be administered without careful oversight from a qualified physician. Many of the modern serotonin-oriented remedies for depression cause a plethora of eclectic side effects ranging from blurred vision and nausea to lethargy and sexual side effects (as if lack of ability to achieve orgasm would not in and of itself become a depressing factor). Additionally, pharmaceutical therapies should most often be supplemented with psychological therapy. Medications can provide symptomatic relief for qualified patients, but drugs cannot teach those patients the cognitive, emotional, and social coping skills necessary to prevent a relapse of depression.
Darkness Visible sheds light upon its dreary subject, but all is not gloom. Styron actually manages to convey a comedic sense of irony through his prose. This irony is subtle, attitudinal, submerged in his account and descriptions. This attitude is betrayed when he lists the names of several writers (Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Sylvia Plath, etc.) who have suffered from depression, himself numbering among them, as if to recount the roster of a truly elite group - melancholic writers - of which Styron is proud to be a member. By surviving to write this book, Styron is an active participant in shaping and extracting his own meaning from the experience of depression.
Depression is a disease that can produce the bittersweet fruit of lasting fellowship among those familiar with the hidden blessings of wisdom resulting from living through madness and despair. This esoteric, intimate knowledge can only be obtained by wrestling with "the dark beast within" and by working out one's own salvation (with fear and trembling, no less). Depressed readers who peruse Darkness Visible may find a valuable sense of community (in fact, the book could very well serve as a valuable therapeutic supplement for specific patients in recovery). And readers who have been fortunate enough to skirt the yawning abyss of depression will find themselves one step closer to dancing, though ever so briefly, with the specter of madness.
On a personal note... I struggled with clinical depression thirteen years ago, culminating in a suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. I can attest that Darkness Visible is the deepest, most subjectively accurate description of this disease that I have ever read. Though the subject matter and style of the book are gloomy, I feel an extraordinary sense of optimism in the experience of completing this book. It's as if the articulation and elucidation exercised by Styron has managed to demystify, and thus disempower, the darkness he sheds light upon.

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27% Off Discounts: Best Buy for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) Review

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision)

Are you looking to buy Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision)? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision). check out the link below:

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Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) Review

Let me start by saying if you find this useful, please click on the "Yes" next to the question "Did you find this review uesful". The reason i ask is because i think this is important information and with enough yes's, it can move to the top of the reviews.
My review is to do with the quality of the book. You will see some people complain about the quality of this book. The reason is because there are 2 editions out there in English, the US release and the India release. The main way you can tell is from the cover as the Indian version has "Jaypee" as the publisher. Now, the Jaypee version is legal to buy and sell in the USA, but is of lesser quality (print and paper) than the US version and thats fine as long as you know thats what you are buying. Some people think they are buying a US release and pay US prices, but get a cheaper version.
As a result, i have created a new listing for the International edition, which can be found using B001GLFCUK in the search box. If it does not work, it is in the process of being accepted by Amazon.
If you thought you were getting a US verion and your copy says "Jaypee", contact the seller who has to accept it back.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) Overview



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