Medicine, Mind and Meaning: A psychiatrist's guide to treating the body, mind, and spirit
by Eve A Wood
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Tucson, AZ: In One Press 2004 347 pp HB $21.95
Written by a psychiatrist who cares deeply for her clients, this book explores ways in which understanding the meanings that guide our lives can help us to sort out various disorders that cause physical and emotional problems.
I agree with the observation about this book by C. Everett Koop, former US Surgeon General, in the foreword: "It is written by a physician who loves her patients and has come to see that life depends not on the hand you are dealt, but on how you choose to live it." (p. 4)
Wood offers a host of helpful observations, as in the following:
Our biggest blind spots tend to encompass how we choose to look at things, what we choose to tell ourselves, or what we opt to believe. ...we usually see the roadblocks as external. We suffer a job loss, or the death of a dream, and allow these experiences to become the cause of our misery. As a result, we are unable to productively move along the life-path. We allow ourselves to be done in or victimized by our pain. We permit our grief to overtake us, robbing us of the joy and fulfillment we are due. We are all, to some extent, tripped up by our own blind spots. (p. 9-10)
Many books offer a spectrum of cases, briefly described. Wood chooses to focus much of her sharings about how she works through a detailed description of the treatment of a severely disturbed woman who was suicidal. This woman had such low self-esteem that she would repeatedly cut herself when she was upset. It took many years of therapy to help her accept herself and settle into much more self-accepting and satisfying ways of being and relating in a world that she had earlier found hostile and unaccepting.
Many books offer the views and understandings of the author as the primary window into appreciating the author’s approaches. Wood chooses to give many pages to the words of her clients, who report how they felt and what it was like to have Wood help them through their difficulties.
Helpful appendices add organizational and informational resources for dealing with disorders of childhood, eating and addictions.
Breaking news: Medicine, Mind and Meaning has just been named a finalist in four categories for ForeWord Magazine's 2005 Best Books of the Year (Psychology, Self-Help, Mind-Body-Spirit and Health), a finalist in two categories in the Nautilus 2005 competition (Psychology/Self-Help and Small Press--an honorary category) and received an Honorable Mention in Writers Digest International's 2005 competition in the category "Inspirational." Also, Dr. Wood is one of three finalists in the Benjamin Franklin 2005 Award's "Best New Voice (Non-Fiction)" category.
(See article by Eve Wood in this issue of IJHC.)
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