Herman M. Van Praag – författare

Religion (and spirituality) is very much alive and shapes the cultural values and aspirations of psychiatrist and patient alike, as does the choice of not identifying with a particular faith.  Patients bring their beliefs and convictions into the doctor-patient relationship.  The challenge for mental health professionals, whatever their own world view, is to develop and refine their vocabularies such that they truly understand what is communicated to them by their patients. Religion and Psychiatry provides psychiatrists with a framework for this understanding and highlights the importance of religion and spirituality in mental well-being.  This book aims to inform and explain, as well as to be thought provoking and even controversial.  Patiently and thoroughly, the authors consider why and how, when and where religion (and spirituality) are at stake in the life of psychiatric patients.  The interface between psychiatry and religion is explored at different levels, varying from daily clinical practice to conceptual fieldwork.  The book covers phenomenology, epidemiology, research data, explanatory models and theories.  It also reviews the development of DSM V and its awareness of the importance of religion and spirituality in mental health.What can religious traditions learn from each other to assist the patient? Religion and Psychiatry discusses this, as well as the neurological basis of religious experiences.  It describes training programmes that successfully incorporate aspects of religion and demonstrates how different religious and spiritual traditions can be brought together to improve psychiatric training and daily practice. Describes the relationship of the main world religions with psychiatryConsiders training, policy and service deliveryProvides powerful support for more effective partnerships between psychiatry and religion in day to day clinical careThis is the first time that so many psychiatrists, psychologists and theologians from all parts of the world and from so many different religious and spiritual backgrounds have worked together to produce a book like this one. In that sense, it truly is a World Psychiatric Association publication.Religion and Psychiatry is recommended reading for residents in psychiatry, postgraduates in theology, psychology and psychology of religion, researchers in psychiatric epidemiology and trans-cultural psychiatry, as well as professionals in theology, psychiatry and psychology of religion

First published in 1990. This monograph series, published under the auspices of the Department of Psychiatry of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, is meant to keep track of important developments in the profession pf psychiatry, to summarize what has been achieved in particular fields, and to bring together the viewpoints obtained from disparate vantage points-in short, to capture some of the excitement ongoing in modern psychiatry, both in its clinical and experimental dimensions. Violence and suicidality have always been major public health issues, but it is only fairly recently that they have become the focus of some major clinical and biological research efforts. This is due partly to a large increase in suicide and homicide rates in the young and partly to a realization that effective management of psychiatric patients cannot be based on categorical diagnosis alone, but requires an understanding of the patient's entire behavioral profile. This volume attempts to describe some of the most important advances in the psychobiological understanding of the behavioral dimensions of suicide and violence that have been made over the last 10 years. It is comprised of papers presented at two symposia held under the auspices of the department of psychiatry of Albert Einstein College of Medicine that were devoted to the topics of violence and suicide.

This is No 4 of a monograph's on Clinical and Experimental Psychiatry, which aims to keep track of important developments in Psychiatry, to summarize what has been achieved in particular fields and to bring together the view points obtained from disparate vantage points- to capture some of the excitement ongoing in modern psychiatry both in its clinical and experimental dimensions. This edition looks the role of Serotonin in Clinical Psychiatric Research.

First published in 1990. This monograph series, published under the auspices of the Department of Psychiatry of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center, is meant to keep track of important developments in the profession pf psychiatry, to summarize what has been achieved in particular fields, and to bring together the viewpoints obtained from disparate vantage points-in short, to capture some of the excitement ongoing in modern psychiatry, both in its clinical and experimental dimensions. Violence and suicidality have always been major public health issues, but it is only fairly recently that they have become the focus of some major clinical and biological research efforts. This is due partly to a large increase in suicide and homicide rates in the young and partly to a realization that effective management of psychiatric patients cannot be based on categorical diagnosis alone, but requires an understanding of the patient's entire behavioral profile. This volume attempts to describe some of the most important advances in the psychobiological understanding of the behavioral dimensions of suicide and violence that have been made over the last 10 years. It is comprised of papers presented at two symposia held under the auspices of the department of psychiatry of Albert Einstein College of Medicine that were devoted to the topics of violence and suicide.

The chapters in this book are based on papers that were presented at the international conference Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Persons, 4–6 March 2002 in Amsterdam. The conference was organized by the Dutch Foundation for Psychiatry and Re- gion (in Dutch: Stichting Psychiatrie en Religie) a small, but active and lively organization, which organizes conferences and post-graduate education for mental health professionals and which offers a platform for interdisciplinary research and discussion in the field of mental health and religion. The organizers of the conference – Gerrit Glas, Herman M. van Praag, and Peter J. Verhagen – are m- bers of the board of the Foundation. All three are psychiatrists; two of them are also professionally occupied in another discipline: theology (Verhagen) and philosophy (Glas). The primary aim of the conference was to create a space for scientific dialogue between two disciplines with a troubled and complex relationship: psychiatry and theology. The exchange of opinions and viewpoints between specifically these two fields has dried up in the course of the past century and has virtually been absent from around 1960 till at least the early nineties of the previous century. I need to clarify that we were quite specific in isolating theology and psychiatry; instead of focusing on theology and psychology, or biblical studies and psychology, or theology and psychoanalysis. Psychology and psychoanalysis do not seem to have lost all contact with theology, at least not to such an extent as have psychiatry and theology.