Pocket Guide to Crisis Intervention: Crisis workers make split-second decisions every day that affect the mental health and well-being of individuals, families, and entire communities. They support and guide people through health diagnoses, bankruptcies, sexual assaults, deaths of loved ones, suicide attempts, and natural or man-made disasters from the front lines.

While professions vary from mental health professionals, emergency responders, educators, business managers or volunteers such as suicide hotline workers, all have a common and urgent need for a rapid reference that covers every type of traumatic event they may be asked to respond to in the course of an unpredictable and highly stressful day.
The Pocket Guide to Crisis Intervention is a complete crisis toolkit, a trusted resource to consult on the fly, packed with easy-to-follow, step-by-step evidence-based protocols for responding effectively to a broad range of traumatic events. Checklists, bullets, and boxes highlight symptoms & warning signs and provide action plans, do’s & don’ts, and screening & assessment questions. Continue reading →

Shame Interrupted: Shame controls far too many of us. Worthless, inferior, rejected, weak, humiliated, failure…it all adds up to wishing we could get away from others and hide. We know what shame feels like. The way out, however, is harder to find. Time doesn’t help, neither does confession, because shame is just as often from what others do to you as it is from what you have done. Continue reading →

Is It My Fault? is a message of hope and healing to victims who know too well the depths of destruction and the overwhelming reality of domestic violence.

At least one in every three women have been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in their lifetime. The effects of domestic violence are physical, social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual, and can have long-lasting distressing consequences. Continue reading →

Anyone living a full, rich life experiences ups and downs, stresses, disappointments, sorrows, and setbacks. Today, however, millions of people who are really no more than “worried well” are being diagnosed as having a mental disorder and receiving unnecessary treatment. In Saving Normal, Allen Frances, one of the world’s most influential psychiatrists, explains why stigmatizing a healthy person as mentally ill leads to unnecessary, harmful medications, the narrowing of horizons, the misallocation of medical resources, and the draining of the budgets of families and the nation. We also shift responsibility for our mental well-being away from our own naturally resilient brains and into the hands of “Big Pharma,” who are reaping multi-billion-dollar profits. Continue reading →