Running on Ritalin or Integrating Traditional Healing Practices into Counseling and Psychotherapy

Running on Ritalin: A Physician Reflects on Children, Society, and Performance in a Pill

Author: Lawrence H Diller

In a book as provocative and newsworthy as Listening to Prozac and Driven to Distraction, a physician speaks out on America's epidemic level of diagnoses for attention deficit disorder, and on the drug that has become almost a symbol of our times: Ritalin.

In 1997 alone, nearly five million people in the United States were prescribed Ritalin--most of them young children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Use of this drug, which is a stimulant related to amphetamine, has increased by 700 percent since 1990. And this phenomenon appears to be uniquely American: 90 percent of the world's Ritalin is used here. Is this a cause for alarm--or simply the case of an effective treatment meeting a newly discovered need? Important medical advance--or drug of abuse, as some critics claim?

Lawrence Diller has written the definitive book about this crucial debate--evenhanded, wide-ranging, and intimate in its knowledge of families, schools, and the pressures of our speeded-up society. As a pediatrician and family therapist, he has evaluated hundreds of children, adolescents, and adults for ADD, and he offers crucial information and treatment options for anyone struggling with this problem.

Running on Ritalin also throws a spotlight on some of our most fundamental values and goals. What does Ritalin say about the old conundrums of nature vs. nurture, free will vs. responsibility? Is ADD a disability that entitles us to special treatment? If our best is not good enough, can we find motivation and success in a pill? Is there still a place for childhood in the performance-driven America of the late nineties?

Time Magazine

In the past 18 months a flurry of ADD and ADHD books have hit the shelves...Lawrence Diller's Running on Ritalin is the book most people are talking about.

Los Angeles Times

Anyone with doubts [about Ritalin] should read this thoughtful book by child psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence H. Diller.

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Integrating Traditional Healing Practices into Counseling and Psychotherapy

Author: Roy Moodley

"If you are a student, professor, or practitioner of the 'talking cures' -- buy this book, read it, use it, and experience the difference it makes in your thoughts and actions." --Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., D.H.C., University of Hawaii, Honolulu, for PsycCritiques (Contemporary Psychology), APA, November 15, 2005 issue

Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counseling and Psychotherapy critically examines ethnic minority cultural and traditional healing in relation to counseling and psychotherapy. Authors Roy Moodley and William West highlight the challenges and changes in the field of multicultural counseling and psychotherapy by integrating current issues of traditional healing with contemporary practice. The book uniquely presents a range of accounts of the dilemmas and issues facing students, professional counselors, psychotherapists, social workers, researchers, and others who use multicultural counseling or transcultural psychotherapy as part of their professional practice.    

Key Features:

• Contributes to the wider debates about ethnic minority health care by focusing on how ethnic minority groups construct illness perceptions and the kinds of treatments they expect to solve health and mental health problems
• Analyzes traditional healing of racial, ethnic, and religious groups living in the United States, Canada, and Britain to consider the diffusion of healing practices across cultural boundaries
•  Explores contemporary alternative healthcare movements such as paganism, New Age Spirituality and healing, transcendental meditation, and new religious movements to increase the knowledge and capacity of clinical expertise of students studying in this field  

Integrating Traditional Healing Practices Into Counseling and Psychotherapy is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate students studying multicultural counseling or psychotherapy. The book is also a valuable resource for academics, researchers, psychotherapists, counselors, and other practitioners.