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The Handbook of Intellectual Disability and Clinical Psychology Practice

The Handbook of Intellectual Disability and Clinical Psychology Practice Alan Carr , Patricia N. Walsh and John McEvoy ( eds ). Routledge , London and New York ‘Handbook: a reference book listing brief facts on a subject or place or directions for repair (as of a car)’ (Collins). Apart from ‘brief’ this is a fair description of this book, though there is more to it than that. It is one of a set of three (the other two concerned with children and adolescents and with adults) and is aimed at clinical psychologists in training, to provide them with ‘a comprehensive handbook to build the skills necessary to complete a clinical placement in the field of disability’. It falls into seven sections. The first three, broadly based, cover conceptual, assessment and intervention frameworks, with diagnosis and life‐span development in the first of these, intelligence, quality of life and interviewing and report‐writing in the second, and person‐centred planning, applied behaviour analysis and cognitive behavioural therapy in the third. Then follow four, practice‐based, sections on successive age‐groups – infancy and early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Themes recur across these sections. Work with families, not only with parents but also siblings and, unusually, grandparents, turns up in the sections on both children and adults. Sexual relationships and problems are found in the chapters on adolescents and adults, the latter focussing on abuse both of and by people with intellectual disabilities. Cognitive behavioural approaches, both to the teaching of and as a way of resolving challenging behaviours in, people with intellectual disabilities are clearly described in the ‘intervention’ chapter and in the chapters on feeding, toiletting and elsewhere, notably in the chapter on modifying challenging behaviours. Running through all these is an emphasis on positive methods, with a rueful backward glance at the bad old days, 40 years ago or so, a time when punitive methods were still given a place. Scattered throughout the chapters are vignettes (taken from real case studies) – in one case, in chapter 20, a series of them, tracking the person’s progress over years of treatment – which show how the methods discussed may be put into practice, and these bring the ideas expounded to life. Each area is exhaustively covered and well referenced [an exception, in my view, being the omission, in the discussion of early intervention, of Cunningham’s (1987) important study]. Each chapter finishes with an exercise, designed to enable the trainee, or more usually a group of trainees, to work over a problem using the knowledge gleaned from the chapter; there could perhaps have been a few more of these. The book is consistently well‐written, for which I guess the editors must take some of the credit, and sometimes charmingly so, as when Baker and Feinfeld helpfully offer 13 ways a trainee could undertake to make a programme fail (p. 357). Apart from wishing for an index of authors, especially since the references are placed at the end of each individual chapter, I have very little to complain of in this book. It has dragged me up to date on several topics, and I recommend it most warmly. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities Wiley

The Handbook of Intellectual Disability and Clinical Psychology Practice

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
ISSN
1360-2322
eISSN
1468-3148
DOI
10.1111/j.1468-3148.2008.00424.x
Publisher site
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Abstract

Alan Carr , Patricia N. Walsh and John McEvoy ( eds ). Routledge , London and New York ‘Handbook: a reference book listing brief facts on a subject or place or directions for repair (as of a car)’ (Collins). Apart from ‘brief’ this is a fair description of this book, though there is more to it than that. It is one of a set of three (the other two concerned with children and adolescents and with adults) and is aimed at clinical psychologists in training, to provide them with ‘a comprehensive handbook to build the skills necessary to complete a clinical placement in the field of disability’. It falls into seven sections. The first three, broadly based, cover conceptual, assessment and intervention frameworks, with diagnosis and life‐span development in the first of these, intelligence, quality of life and interviewing and report‐writing in the second, and person‐centred planning, applied behaviour analysis and cognitive behavioural therapy in the third. Then follow four, practice‐based, sections on successive age‐groups – infancy and early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Themes recur across these sections. Work with families, not only with parents but also siblings and, unusually, grandparents, turns up in the sections on both children and adults. Sexual relationships and problems are found in the chapters on adolescents and adults, the latter focussing on abuse both of and by people with intellectual disabilities. Cognitive behavioural approaches, both to the teaching of and as a way of resolving challenging behaviours in, people with intellectual disabilities are clearly described in the ‘intervention’ chapter and in the chapters on feeding, toiletting and elsewhere, notably in the chapter on modifying challenging behaviours. Running through all these is an emphasis on positive methods, with a rueful backward glance at the bad old days, 40 years ago or so, a time when punitive methods were still given a place. Scattered throughout the chapters are vignettes (taken from real case studies) – in one case, in chapter 20, a series of them, tracking the person’s progress over years of treatment – which show how the methods discussed may be put into practice, and these bring the ideas expounded to life. Each area is exhaustively covered and well referenced [an exception, in my view, being the omission, in the discussion of early intervention, of Cunningham’s (1987) important study]. Each chapter finishes with an exercise, designed to enable the trainee, or more usually a group of trainees, to work over a problem using the knowledge gleaned from the chapter; there could perhaps have been a few more of these. The book is consistently well‐written, for which I guess the editors must take some of the credit, and sometimes charmingly so, as when Baker and Feinfeld helpfully offer 13 ways a trainee could undertake to make a programme fail (p. 357). Apart from wishing for an index of authors, especially since the references are placed at the end of each individual chapter, I have very little to complain of in this book. It has dragged me up to date on several topics, and I recommend it most warmly.

Journal

Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities – Wiley

Published: Jul 1, 2009

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