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Trauma

The Body Remembers
For both clinicians and their clients there is tremendous value in understanding the psychophysiology of trauma and knowing what to do about its manifestations. It is now thought that people who have been traumatized hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of post traumatic stress disorder – nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses and dissociative behaviors. In essence, the body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored.

The Body Remembers - Casebook
A natural progression from “The Body Remembers”, the casebook provides the reader with numerous examples of how multiple modalities can be blended to bring optimal healing to trauma survivors. Each case stands as an inspirational, educational exposition of creative, in the moment, step-by-step healing, guided by a respectful, sensitive therapist.

Waking the Tiger – Healing Trauma
The book deals with normalizing the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed for healing. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us to focus on bodily sensations. Through a heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

Addiction and Trauma

Treating Addicted Survivors of Trauma
Provides the tools professionals need to help adult and adolescent survivors of childhood abuse and other traumas who struggle with addictive disorders. Systematically integrating mental health paradigms with disease models of addiction, this easy-to-implement model combines psychotherapeutic techniques with 12-step recovery practices for effective assessment and treatment.

Addictions and Trauma Recovery
A comprehensive recovery model designed for groups as well as for individuals and their therapists/counselors. The “Addiction and Trauma Recovery Integration Model” (ATRIUM) launches a 12-week program to address the core problems linked to trauma and addiction experiences. Its unique approach blends psycho educational, process, and expressive activities to assess the effects of trauma on the body, mind and spirit.

Addiction

Addiction & Grace
Describes the processes of attachment that lead to addiction and examines the relationship between addiction and spiritual awareness. It details the various addictions from which we suffer – not only to alcohol and drugs, but also to work, sex, performance, responsibility and intimacy. Emphasizes how addiction represents a doomed attempt to assert complete control over our lives. Addiction & Grace is a compassionate and wise treatment of this important topic, offering a critical yet hopeful guide to a place of freedom based on contemplative spirituality.

Substance Abuse in Canada
The most recent data on substance abuse in Canada – which costs approximately $40 billion annually – is full of surprises. What substance causes the most harm? Why do some people become addicted and not others? Based on the most up-to-date information available, this book separates myth from reality, considers Canada in an international context, and evaluates policy options.

Compulsive Acquiring and Hoarding

Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring
The problem of compulsive hoarding and acquiring is more widespread than commonly believed. It often goes undiagnosed, either because sufferers are ashamed of their compulsions or because they don’t believe it is a problem that merits professional attention. As much as two percent of the U.S. population suffers secretly from this condition. Written by developers of a ground-breaking treatment, this manual is the first to present an empirically supported and effective CBT program for treating compulsive hoarding and acquiring. This guide gives clinicians the information to understand hoarding and proven tools to help clients overcome their compulsive behaviors. It teaches individuals how to recognize errors in thinking and uses both imagined and real exposures to teach them the skills they need to manage their problem.

Buried in Treasures
Written by the scientists who have worked for over a dozen years to develop a scientifically based and effective program for treating compulsive hoarding. This book outlines a program of skill-building, learning to think about possessions in a different way and gradual challenges to help people who hoard manage their clutter and their lives. It also provides useful information for family members and friends of people who hoard, as they struggle to understand and help.

A little less recent...

Mental Illness

Bellevue – Inside and Out - DVD
New York City’s Bellevue Hospital has a renowned psychiatric emergency center that treats 7,000 men and women annually. This gritty program takes a daunting look at the daily operation of the center by focusing on a handful of people as they struggle with their illnesses. The entire experience is presented, from criminal arrests and admissions of new patients to long-term treatment and therapy groups. In addition to working with mental disorders, doctors and nurses also confront drug and alcohol addiction in an environment where 50 percent of their patients have substance abuse problems.

Reach One, Teach One - DVD
People with psychiatric condition gather to share their practical knowledge and experience and help each other take steps towards recovery. They candidly discuss real-life stresses – finding housing, navigating the mental health system, returning to work.

Spirit of Recovery - DVD
Everyone can learn from each other’s experience. Spirit of Recovery gives us an engaging conversation between a person with a psychiatric disability, a parent and a therapist. Viewers will be helped to understand both the challenges and the possibilities of recovery from a severe mental illness. This DVD can facilitate wide ranging and much needed discussion of the reality that people recover from severe mental illnesses.

Families Coping With Mental Illness - VHS
Ten people discuss having a relative with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. They discuss what it is like when your child or sibling becomes mentally ill, avoidable mistakes, down-to-earth suggestions for people with a mentally ill family member, setting limits so as to be able to have your own life and the ongoing impact of having a mentally ill family member.

West 47th Street
This video follows four people with mental illness, off the streets and out of homeless shelters, in and out of the hospital, at home and at work, over three years. The film offers an unprecedented window on the real lives of people who are often feared or ignored, seldom understood, and focuses on their resilience, optimism and grace. The four “stars” of the film are members of the psychosocial rehabilitation center Fountain House, located in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen.

Stop Pointing!
This video is about the stigma of mental illness. Eight individuals candidly discuss their experiences with work and stigma, family and stigma, self stigma and what can and should be done about stigma.

Meds
This is a film about a diverse group of individuals and their experiences on psychiatric medications. They candidly talk about all the medications they tried before they found one that worked, the many side effects they had to endure, and the symptoms that the medications helped alleviate. They also explain the techniques they use on their road to recovery.

Mood Disorders

Depression and Manic Depression - DVD
Depression affects over 17 million Americans each year, and it’s been estimated that only one-third of this group gets any treatment, largely because of stigma and fear. The lack of treatment results in a high number of suicides, making this illness as fatal as any other illness and a public epidemic. This program from “The Doctor is In” explains the disease through the experiences of several people, including “60 Minutes” host Mike Wallace; Kay Redfield Jamison, psychiatrist and author of a book on her life with manic depressive illness; artist Lama Dejani; and State Department official Robert Boorstin. The program also provides an overview of the medications and therapy currently in use.

Depression: Out of the Shadows
This video tells the dramatic stories of people of different ages, from diverse backgrounds, who live with various forms of depression. Leading mental health experts highlight the latest scientific research and innovative treatments, offering greater understanding and hope for the millions of people living with this complex, but treatable, disease.

Bipolar Disorder: Speaking From Experience
Bipolar Disorder, or manic depression, is an illness that affects brain function. It causes extreme moods in about 2% of the population. People with Bipolar Disorder can become high, over-excited and reckless, or imagine that they are more important than they are. They can also become very low, feeling helpless and depressed, with difficulty making decisions or concentrating.

Some experience mainly highs, others mainly lows, and some both. Some may be affected so much that they are unable to distinguish reality. Behaviour may be uncharacteristically irrational or risky.

Bipolar Disorder’s causes are not fully understood, but are likely to include heredity. A genetic predisposition has been clearly established. Most people with Bipolar Disorder recover well from episodes of illness. Symptoms can be reduced or eliminated with treatment, which usually includes community support.

Schizophrenia

The Bonnie Tapes - DVD
Bonnie had her first psychotic break when she was 16. Now 27, she and her family talk together about the illness as it hit them then and about living with it since. In these tapes, Bonnie and her family make a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the subjective effects of major mental illness on the patient, parents and siblings.

Schizophrenia – DVD
ABC News (Television)
The show highlights a device that uses virtual reality to stimulate the visual and auditory hallucinations characteristic with symptoms of psychosis.

Suicide

Jumping Off Bridges - DVD
Inspired by invincible friendships, junior high journal entries, heart breaking crushes and the complexities of losing loved ones, “Jumping Off Bridges” follows a carefree, adventurous group of four best friends deep in the trenches of adolescence. It’s a story about friendship, a story about strength and a story about finding hope.

Addiction

Addiction – Why Can’t They Just Stop? – DVD (set of 4)
Several of the nation’s leading experts on drug and alcohol addiction, together with a group of accomplished filmmakers, have assembled to create “Addiction”, an unprecedented documentary aimed at helping Americans understand addiction as a treatable brain disease. It is a subject that touches all our lives. The documentary addresses different aspects of the disease in order to shed light on the most current, promising developments in the field. Through personal stories from addicts and the loved ones who struggle to help them find treatment, common misconceptions are replaced by insight into addiction’s complexity.

Messing with Heads: Marijuana and Mental Illness
For decades, heavy marijuana use has been linked to impaired judgment and mental ability. This program explores new research into another link – this time between marijuana and mental illnesses, specifically schizophrenia and paranoid psychosis. Citing a wealth of clinical evidence and observations by neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, the program delves into the frightening effects of THC on young brains: psychotic delusions and behaviour that may not appear until years after drug abuse has ended. With pot addiction beginning at increasingly young ages around the world, this program is essential viewing in any anti-drug education campaign.

Anxiety Disorder

Panic Attacks. Don’t Panic - DVD
ABC News (Television)
There is a kind of pain that is invisible and terrifying – panic attacks. In their most extreme form, people are so paralyzed with fear that for years they are unable even to leave their own homes. Psychologist David Barlow and Director of the Centre for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University says a number of factors, including heredity and stress can make a person vulnerable to panic attacks. But there is a pioneering therapy that, in many cases, could be an alternative to drugs or months, even years of therapy in treating panic attacks with agoraphobia. The idea behind this therapy is to have the patient confront their fear in a controlled setting.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - DVD
Whenever Lois Pile hits the road, she also thinks she’s hitting people on the road. She truly believes this. Lois is constantly looking around, checking the mirrors, anticipating a catastrophe that never happens. Los’ real problem is not her driving. Instead, Lois suffers from an illness, a form of obsessive compulsive disorder “harming obsession”, and in her case, Lois is afraid she’s going to run someone over. ABC News speaks to several OCD sufferers who have a chemical imbalance that manifests in intrusive thought patterns.

Concurrent Disorders

Treating Co-occurring Disorders (Robert E. Drake)
This video presentation fully explores the correlation between substance use disorders and severe mental illness. Prominent co-occurring disorders expert Robert E. Drake, director of the New Hampshire-Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Centre, shows why it’s essential that substance abuse treatment and mental health treatment be closely integrated.

General

Secrets of the Mind – DVD
Investigate his breakthrough research in phantom limb syndrome and how he discovered how the brain undergoes a massive “re-wiring” when a person loses a limb. Explore the power of the mind in pain control. See how frightening seizures result in unbelievably intense spiritual experiences. And, discover how findings learned from brain injuries help us learn about the normal brain.

Cracking Up
With standup comedy there is a fine line between punch-lines and pain. Cracking Up documents the remarkable journey of a group of twelve courageous people who set out to turn their painful experience of mental illness into standup comedy.