Counseling Individuals Through the Lifespan

This is a great book for learning. It was written by previous doctors with more experience than current learners. Many are saying they don’t like it because of some disorders listed like trans disorders. There’s realities a lot of us don’t like that we all have to accept. First thing to being a good learner is knowing the history of your field and accepting the reality of it. History of this field is many have always been in denial of psychology for years from bipolar to schizophrenia to multiple personality disorder because it can be scary to accept you have a diagnoses and learn how to live with it. Today many are in denial of trans disorder. No one can force anyone to accept it like no one could force people to accept they have a disorder through history but it is reality. We can’t be professionals and not accept reality or history. Every human is broken in some form because perfect doesn’t exist. This is a great book to help accept the reality and not hide things or just give us what we want to hear. We all wish anxiety didn’t exist cause majority of us have it but it’s reality and another example of just not giving us what we want to hear. The point is giving us paths to help others heal and help one another heal but no one is forcing these methods just like no one can force someone to believe they do have a problem. So this is a good book with reality.

This book comes exactly as described. Best price I could find for this textbook. I needed it for my counseling graduate school program. Thanks Amazon!

I used this book for a counseling course, and it was required, just to get that out of the way. So no, I couldn't have used a different book. I have a bit of a laundry list of beefs with this book, from typos to the color of their highlight (teal), to being incredibly wordy... there are many instances my classmates and I would talk about how ridiculous this book is. My husband often told me I didn't complain about any other book as much as this book. I learned from it, of course, but oof. I almost want to write my own book based on the information and present it for use for this class. I'm pretty sure I could have edited this one in half.

This book not only lacks awareness of diversity (eg assuming that all pregnant people are women and that the dad is present), it is redundant, out of date and often does a bad job vetting articles to cite. For example, it does a soft nod toward conversion therapy in the section where it talks about “gender identity disorder”- which literally does not exist anymore. Plus, the field of counseling does not endorse conversion therapy ever. It also narrates dead white men as the foundational theorists for the field, and then consistently plays into racialized stereotypes. I do not recommend.

I'm not entirely sure how this came to be published, let alone reach a second edition. The book is littered with typos but, most importantly, is incredibly hard to read. The subject matter is great but, somehow, the authors manage to make it exceedingly hard to digest. You'll find yourself constantly rereading sentences or entire paragraphs to take in what the authors mean. I'm having to read this as it's a course text for my graduate program, but I really hope the authors overhaul the content for a subsequent edition so no-one else has to endure this.