Explore an ecological strength-based framework for the treatment of gender-variant clientsThis comprehensive book provides you with a clinical and theoretical overview of the issues facing transgendered/transsexual people and their families. Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working with Gender-Variant People and Their Families views assessment and treatment through a nonpathologizing lens that honors human diversity and acknowledges the role of oppression in the de...

Boys who play with Barbie dolls. Girls who join the football team. What is gender? What are gender roles? What's the difference between being a tomboy and being transgender? Is it possible to be in the wrong body? Explore the answers to these questions with an in-depth look at what it means to be transgender, based on the personal experiences of the men and women who have taken steps to transition. Learn from the experiences of transgender young people who make the significant choice to li...

Written by a social worker, popular educator, and member of the transgender community, this well-rounded resource combines an accessible portrait of transgenderism with a rich history of transgender life and its unique experiences of discrimination. Chapters introduce transgenderism and its psychological, physical, and social processes. They describe the coming out process and its effect on family and friends, the relationship between sexual orientation, and gender and the differences betw...

If ever there was an area requiring that the research-practice gap be bridged, surely it occurs where thanatologists engage with people dealing with human mortality and loss. The field of thanatology—the study of death and dying—is a complex, multidisciplinary area that encompases the range of human experiences, emotions, expectations, and realities. The Handbook of Thanatology is the most authoritative volume in the field, providing a single source of up-to-date scholarship, rese...

Since first being identified as a distinct psychiatric disorder in 1943, autism has been steeped in contestation and controversy. Present-day skirmishes over the potential causes of autism, how or even if it should be treated, and the place of Asperger’s syndrome on the autism spectrum are the subjects of intense debate in the research community, in the media, and among those with autism and their families. Bringing together innovative work on autism by international scholars in the social...

This book provides a sociological analysis of major areas of mental health and illness.

Elizabeth Barnes argues compellingly that disability is primarily a social phenomenon--a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. This is how disability is understood in the Disability Rights and Disability Pride movements; but there is a massive disconnect with the way disability is typically viewed within analytic philosophy. The idea that disability is not inherently bad or sub-optimal is one that many phil...

Psychiatry and psychology have a long and highly debated history in relation to gender. In particular, they have attracted criticism for policing the boundaries of ‘normal’ gender expression through gender identity diagnoses, such as transvestism, transsexualism, gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria.Drawing on discursive psychology, this book traces the historical development of psychiatric constructions of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ gender expression. It contextualizes the r...

Trans communities are in the headlines. Everybody has an opinion on ‘what transsexuality is’. But how do trans people them-selves describe being trans? This community based study examined this question. Findings include that the diversity and complexity of people’s experience by far exceeds what is commonly acknowledged. Physical embodiment and social acceptance are important to trans people, but the most unifying themes are self-finding, self-realization and spiritu-ality. Experiences des...

While social work policy can be considered the what, and practice, the how, the study of human behavior is concerned with why. Why do people do the things they do? Why do individuals behave differently in groups than when alone? Why do some people become the victims of their lives while others who have endured tragedy become life's heroes? Resilience across the life span is a new major theme of the second edition of the bestselling Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Micro Level. In an...

Globally, suicides account for a significant number of premature deaths every year. Traditional approaches to suicide research and prevention are not working for everyone, but why is this? And what can be done about it?In Critical Suicidology, a team of international scholars, practitioners, and people directly affected by suicide argue that the field of suicidology has become too focused on the biomedical paradigm: a model that pathologizes distress and obscures the socia...

This volume presents a contemporary and comprehensive overview of the great diversity of theoretical interests, new ideas, and practical applications that characterize social psychological approaches to stereotyping and prejudice.All the contributions are written by renowned scholars in the field, with some chapters focusing on fundamental principles, including research questions about the brain structures that help us categorize and judge others, the role of evolution in prejudice...