Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness

By Patricia Erickson, Steven Erickson,

Book cover of Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict

Book description

Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

More than anything else I have read, this book helped me understand the relationship between crime and mental illness in the United States. The book explore some really fascinating case studies (for example, school shooter Kip Kinkel).

But the bigger contribution is how the authors sort out the core ideological approaches of the law versus the social sciences (including psychology and psychiatry.) They show how the law is rooted in philosophical and religious ideas about good, evil, and free will. In contrast, the social sciences use complex empirical observations and theories to explain human behavior.

The best chapter, in my…

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Book cover of Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

Traumatization and Its Aftermath By Antonieta Contreras,

A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.

The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…

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