Interesting and helpful

This is an extremely helpful academic text, largely directed at medical and other clinicians diagnosing and treating post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the book is also helpful for laymen like myself, searching for a comprehensive understanding of the signs, symptoms and treatments for this diagnosis.

The book covers the complexity of the disorder quite well. As noted in Chapter 2, on a Holistic approach to healing trauma and PTSD, "considerations concerning the psychological treatments for postraumatic stress syndromes (PTSS) are complex and multidimensional in nature. The treatment... involves contact with forces that inflict psychological injury and attack the human spirit and efforts to remain psychically whole."

That's a perfect definition, in a nutshell. Question is, what to do about it. The book contains, lengthy discussions of the specific effects, and different manifestations of this disorder, an encyclopedic chapter on psychopharmacological therapies, and other clinical treatment methods.

For my purposes, the chapter on childhood trauma is most interesting. This section covers a host of treatment modalities. My only complaint is that the section does not cover neurobiofeedback, a type of brain therapy and training which seems to hold a great deal of promise.

I'm also skeptical about the limited number of treatments recommended for several modalities.

But the book covers a broad number of issues, and will be helpful to clinicians and victims as well as the families of victims.

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