Regular marked price: $14.95Discount Price: $10.17
Cost Savings: $4.78 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN num: 9780060954871
ISBN number: 0060954876
Label: Harper Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 344
Printing Date: October 01, 2001
Publishing house: Harper Paperbacks
Release Date: October 09, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 132194
Studio: Harper Paperbacks
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Discover groundbreaking findings on a hidden epidemic -- and why it so often is misdiagnosed.
You peer into the mirror and have trouble recognizing yourself. You feel as if you're going through the motions of life or you're watching a movie of yourself.
These are all symptoms of dissociation -- a debilitating psychological condition involving feelings of disconnection that affects 30 million people in North America and often goes untreated. The Stranger in the Mirror offers unique guidelines for identifying and recovering from dissociative symptoms based on Dr. Marlene Steinberg's breakthrough diagnostic test. Filled with fascinating case histories of people with multiple personalities, this book provides enlightening insights into how all of us respond to trauma and overcome it. Her innovative method of treatment will benefit anyone in search of a healthier sense of self and a heightened capacity for joy.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
What I particularly noticed when I read this book was the amount of compassion Dr. Steinberg appears to have for her patients and dissociative individuals in general. Dr. Steinberg is the creator of the SCID-D, known as the "gold standard" for testing for dissociative disorders. She also has a great deal of experience in treating dissociative patients. Clearly, she is well qualified to write this book. Personally, I found this remarkable blend of professional insight and human compassion to be a delightful breath of fresh air.
No single text, in and of itself, I feel, can make anyone into an "expert" on any subject. Period. However, if one has a desire to learn about and understand dissociative symptoms and disorders, this is an excellent resource whether one is a complete neophyte in regard to the subject of dissociation, or simply desiring to gain a richer understanding of what they already know about dissociative disorders.
In my honest and humble opinion, I find this to be an excellent read which I have already recommended to others I know in my personal life. In all likelihood, I will probably read this book again soon as I have certainly kept thinking about the information presented within its pages since I read it. This is truly a wonderful book.
Rated by buyers -
To express the impact this book has had on my life goes beyond words. It absolutely turned my life upside down and started me on a journey toward wholeness and healing, after years of being misdiagnosed, and spinning my wheels. I recommend this book very first and foremost to anyone with chronic mental illness. The quizzes at the end of the chapters are extremely helpful as a preliminary assessment of where one might lie on the dissociation continuum. This book should be required reading for everyone training in a mental health or medical field.
Rated by buyers -
Everyone dissociates. When you drive home on auto pilot and don't remember the trip, when you walk into a room and can't remember what you went in there for, when someone is in an accident and goes into an altered state where they keep functioning even though injured until they're safe again, getting help and can experience the pain.
This books describes the author's diagnostic tool for evaluating dissociative experiences. She has developed a matrix of five categories of dissociation and five levels of severity. She stresses that if the dissociation is causing problems for an individual, the condition responds well to appropriate treatment no matter what the severity.
One goal is to de-stigmatize persistent dissociative conditions and to remind all professionals that everyone should be treated with respect, no matter what behaviour they exhibit. No one's personality should be treated as a freak show.
Another gaol is to encourage everyone to take care of themselves, to nurture their inner environment for a healthier life and she provides some great ideas on how to do that.
I believe the author accomplishes these goals. This is a very readable, fascinating, helpful book.
Rated by buyers -
This is probably my all-time favourite book on dissociation. Readers will find an easy to understand description of all of the different types of dissociation and a discusion of the extent to which we all range in levels of dissociation.
Written mostly in everyday language, it is an interesting read for professionals as well as clients or the public in general.
Particularly interesting are the excerpts of the SCID questionnaire so that you can try to get some idea of where on the dissociative continuum you may fall, and what particular types of dissociation you experience.
Rated by buyers -
Steinberg's book is a helpful selection of her own cases and diagnostic criteria for dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In my opinion, the standardized criteria are the most valuable part of the book. (They form a subset of complete criteria published elsewhere.) They should be as much part of the professional training of mental health workers as the better-known criteria for depression, anxiety, and psychosis. The only drawback is that she concentrates mostly on full-blown DID (fully developed personality alters) and doesn't give much space to more limited and more common dissociative disorders (DDs) such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Steinberg's criteria are similar to those included in the DSM-IV and to the Dissociative Experiences Scale and Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire developed in the 1980s.
An aura of hocus-pocus still surrounds DDs, and many mental health professionals are scared away from the subject. The terrible abuse often suffered by DD victims is not easy to think about or accept. The "identity" part of DID is a disorder of the imagination - on top of an automatic dissociative defense, child victims create alter identities from altered states of consciousness, so they can be "someone else" or "somewhere else" or "sometime else" during abuse, compartmentalize the weird from the normal, and stifle powerful, ambivalent feelings towards abusive loved ones. (Abusers often reinforce this with threats and make-believe.) The result is freaky, although similar in many ways to brainwashing and cults. In addition, a powerful, though medically unsound, reaction developed in the 1990s against the political and legal misuse of trauma by fringe elements of the mental health profession, witch-hunters looking for Satan and radical feminists crusading against patriarchy. (In the West, patriarchy is as dead as the dodo. The whereabouts of Satan remain unclear.) Steinberg's book is a useful corrective to this reaction, insofar as it keeps DID victims and their loved ones from being intimidated by misinformed bullies.
After the diagnostic criteria, the most important service Steinberg renders is to clarify why dissociation is often missed. As mental health screening has improved, DD sufferers are caught more often, but then misdiagnosed by being labeled with their secondary problems - typically, mood and anxiety disorders, but also obsessive-compulsive behavior and fuzzy "personality" problems. Standardized diagnostic criteria are essential to identify DDs and differentiate them from other conditions.
Here emerges the major flaw of Steinberg's book, her lack of historical awareness. DDs, together with post-traumatic stress and borderline personality disorder, were well-known 100 years ago. All three were lumped under the label of "hysteria" and often treated, with some success, using hypnosis and drugs. The main thing missing in those days was an understanding of the physiological basis of stress. (Hormones were discovered in 1915, and the "fight-or-flight" response, the key to stress, in the 1930s. The remarkable later work of Pavlov with his poor dogs was largely unknown in the West until the 1960s.) The main thing wrong was a certain Victorian reticence. Otherwise, leading psychiatrists and psychologists were on the right track. Then several developments derailed good medicine. The best-known is the rise of psychoanalysis. Reversing his brilliant start with Studies in Hysteria, Freud and followers claimed (although not consistently) that traumatic memories were really childhood fantasies or expressions of a speculative "death instinct." Military psychiatrists eventually rejected such ideas when applied to soldiers, once they accepted that every man in combat, no matter how well trained and led, has his limit. Why should this not hold all the more of abused children, isolated and unprepared? Truly, this was an elaborate strategy of ignoring or blaming the victim.
But the most important misstep came after 1920 from the then-new concept of schizophrenia. Certain dissociative symptoms sound superficially like schizophrenia, and a reign of misdiagnosis descended. This reign continues, except the fad misdiagnoses yesterday are increasingly anxiety and manic-depression. The focus on symptoms that can be treated by the band-aid of psychoactive drugs is also very strong. The cure of DDs requires intensive psychotherapy that typically lasts a few years. (Many DD patients are misdiagnosed for 10+ years.) However, if carried to its end, the therapy is almost always successful, and patients achieve a complete fusion of alter states. But before that can happen, patients have to endure a long road of reconditioning and personality re-integration. These techniques overlap with post-traumatic stress and borderline personality treatments such as desensitization, DBT, EMDR, and hypnosis.
For mental health professionals, ... Read More
Find other books like this one:
