The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook: A Guide to Healing, Recovery, and Growth / Edition 2

For the Clinician

Issued ten years ago, the first edition of Schiraldi's PTSD Sourcebook became (at least over time) the "industry standard" orientation text for new counselors and therapists in the VA Healthcare System. Then, as now, it was both comprehensive and easy to understand.

I wondered (in about 2000 or 2001) why it wasn't used as a complete "patient education" piece, but over time, I came to understand that the VA is =very= conservative about such matters. With good reason, at least in some respects: There was material in the first edition that was surely capable of triggering PTSD symptoms in readers who had not yet progressed far enough in therapy to defend against such triggering.

While not a substantial revision of the original, the second edition does add a number of simplified descriptions of therapeutic techniques as well as mentions here and there of newer efficacy research to support these and previously included methods. That said, the second edition continues to be the single best, mass-market text available for understanding PTSD's causes and conditions, as well as doing something meaningful about it.

With regard to the controversy over triggering, my suggestion is simply that while PTSD sufferers with denser, more primitive ego defenses (e.g.: dissociation, rage, nihilistic depressive orientation) require some work before tackling a book like this, most sufferers - and family members alike - will be hugely rewarded for diving in here. Schiraldi's book is "practical" and "hands-on," as opposed to "heavily neurobiological" or "interactionally theoretical."

This is not Bessel van der Kolk's (wonderful) =Traumatic Stress= or even Matthew Friedman's terrific little =Post-Traumatic and Acute Stress Disorders=. But, as a clinician, I found it (once again) to be a very effective re-orientation toward discussing PTSD and its component issues =with= those who are neither neuropsychologists or theory-soaked experts on interactional traumatization, let alone psychopharmacologists.

Schiraldi neatly distills the whole gamut of topics on nature and nurture, as well as stress and de-stress, into one- and two-syllable verbiage we can use to make sense of it all the same way the =patient= will have to make sense of it.

Do I have issues with the book? Of course. Shiraldi does tend towards the VAHS culture's view that one size fits all here and there. And some clinicians who have not themselves worked through their all-or-nothing orientations may get the idea that the author has covered all of the possible bases. He has not. But if he tried to do so, the book would be impossibly large, as well as needlessly difficult for lay readers.

That's a critique, however, that can be made of nearly any mass market book on such a complex subject. On the whole, this is a valuable and worthwhile read for clinicians and patients alike.

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Mist

She nods.ok. will do.

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