Listen to Richard Mollica talk about mental health problems in Haiti on NPR's "Morning Edition"
- Binding
- Paperback
List price: $19.95 s
- ISBN
- 9780826516411
- Pages
- 288
- Dimensions
- 6in x 9in
- Illustrations
- 0
- Publication Date
- 2008-12-29
Healing Invisible Wounds
Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World
Richard F. Mollica
Author Bio
Richard F. Mollica, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, directs the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma. He is the recipient of the Human Rights Award from the American Psychiatric Association.Main Description
In these personal reflections on his thirty years of clinical work with victims of genocide, torture, and abuse in the United States, Cambodia, Bosnia, and other parts of the world, Richard Mollica describes the surprising capacity of traumatized people to heal themselves.Here is how Neil Boothby, Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, describes the book:
"Mollica provides a wealth of ethnographic and clinical evidence that suggests the human capacity to heal is innate--that the 'survival instinct' extends beyond the physical to include the psychological as well. He enables us to see how recovery from 'traumatic life events' needs to be viewed primarily as a 'mystery' to be listened to and explored, rather than solely as a 'problem' to be identified and solved. Healing involves a quest for meaning--with all of its emotional, cultural, religious, spiritual and existential attendants--even when bio-chemical reactions are also operative."
Healing Invisible Wounds reveals how trauma survivors, through the telling of their stories, teach all of us how to deal with the tragic events of everyday life. Mollica's important discovery that humiliation--an instrument of violence that also leads to anger and despair--can be transformed through his therapeutic project into solace and redemption is a remarkable new contribution to survivors and clinicians.
This book reveals how in every society we have to move away from viewing trauma survivors as "broken people" and "outcasts" to seeing them as courageous people actively contributing to larger social goals. When violence occurs, there is damage not only to individuals but to entire societies, and to the world. Through the journey of self-healing that survivors make, they enable the rest of us not only as individuals but as entire communities to recover from injury in a violent world.
Reviews
The reader closes this book with a renewed appreciation of the power of individuals to heal themselves.--The Lancet
The stories recounted here bear eloquent and often moving testimony to the resilience of human beings.
-- The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu
This book miraculously extracts a message not of despair but of hope
--Anne Fadiman
Extras
Read the Press Release . . .
How Trauma Victims Heal Themselves
Survivors' journeys of self-healing enable entire communities to recover from injury in a violent world
HEALING INVISIBLE WOUNDS: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World was first published in hardcover in 2006 to extraordinary critical acclaim. A new paperback edition was just published by Vanderbilt University Press. In these personal reflections on his thirty years of clinical work with victims of genocide, torture, and abuse in the United States, Cambodia, Bosnia, and other parts of the world, Dr. Richard Mollica describes the surprising capacity of traumatized people to heal themselves. Here is what some reviewers had to say when the harcover was published:
"Passionately endorsing a humanitarian, holistic and culturally sensitive approach to healing, Mollica persuades with pertinent reference to contemporary neuroscience and to ancient and non-Western healing practices." • Publishers Weekly
"His empowering message is that the invisible wounds left by violence are not intractable, that people can and will persevere." • Booklist
"Mollica provides a wealth of ethnographic and clinical evidence that suggests the human capacity to heal is innate—that the ‘survival instinct’ extends beyond the physical to include the psychological as well." • Neil Boothby, Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health, Columbia University
"The reader closes this book with a renewed appreciation of the power of individuals to heal themselves and with a clearer understanding of a profound paradox of human life: that hope can arise from despair." • The Lancet
"The stories recounted here bear eloquent and often moving testimony to the resilience of human beings in the face of awful traumatic experiences and their remarkable capacity to heal themselves." • The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu
"This book miraculously extracts a message not of despair but of hope from the stories they have entrusted to his sensitive care." • Anne Fadiman
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