Psychiatric Aspects of Violence: Issues in Prevention and Treatment • Working With AIDS Bereavement: A Comprehensive Approach for Mental Health Providers

The eight chapters of this monograph are written by members of the American Psychiatric Association's task force on psychiatric aspects of violence. Topics include the biology of violence, clinician safety, assessment of the risk of violence, family violence, and primary prevention of violence through seven principles for changing health behavior, intended for application in children's support systems. Two chapters address sexual violence—one is about the victim and the second is about the perpetrator—and the final chapter covers treatment of traumatized patients and victims of violence. Editor Carl Bell, M.D., is professor of psychiatry and public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and chief executive officer and president of the Community Mental Health Council and Foundation in Chicago.

The authors of this monograph propose what they call the integrative model of AIDS bereavement. The model takes into account historical and cultural factors affecting mourning for people who die of AIDS and the range of psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral approaches that may be used to help mourners. It identifies four levels of AIDS bereavement distress—uncomplicated grief, uncomplicated grief with risk factors, complicated grief without clinical disorder, and complicated grief with clinical disorder—and defines a series of interventions. The authors are director and codirector of the Stanford AIDS Caregiving and Bereavement Study. The monograph is the third from the AIDS health project of the University of California, San Francisco; the fourth one, published this summer, is HIV Treatment: Mental Health Aspects of Antiviral Therapy, also $12.95. The monographs and related material are available from the UCSF AIDS Health Project, Box 0884, San Francisco, California 94143-0884; fax, 415-476-7996.