Summary
Contents
Subject index
Assessing Woman Battering challenges traditional mental health approaches to domestic violence and offers alternative strategies and procedures to improve the response to battered women. The book is a guide to the conceptual and practical issues associated with identifying and assessing battered women in mental health services. Edward W. Gondolf draws from research on mental health assessment and his own surveys of battered womenÆs services to illustrate these issues. The expertise of battered women advocates is used to develop answers to critical assessment issues. Beyond a how-to book, Assessing Woman Battering discusses the issues underlying the identification and assessment of battered women and assists clinicians in providing an appropriate and safe response for them. It presents ways to build collaboration that improves assessment and referrals, and establishes a supportive environment that enhances disclosure of woman battering, identifying potential strengths and further safety rather than increasing risks. Concluding chapters consider issues involved in assessing women of different racial backgrounds and men who battered their female partners. This timely and well-written book is directed to mental health practitioners and domestic violence workers as well as academics, researchers, and students in the helping professions. Academics, researchers, mental health practitioners, domestic violence workers, and professionals in violence against women, interpersonal violence, social work, clinical/counseling psychology, sociology, gender studies, family studies, public health, criminology, and nursing will find this book useful.
Case Studies of Mental Health Evaluations
Case Studies of Mental Health Evaluations
Mental Health Evaluation
In this chapter, I take an extended look at the mental health evaluation of battered women to assess the concerns of battered women's advocates and the challenges that face mental health clinicians. The cases illustrate the differences in perspective and approach between mental health clinicians and advocates and suggest the practical issues that face professionals in both specialties. The cases suggest that identifying psychiatric symptomatology often takes precedence over assessing the dangers commonly associated with woman battering.
I summarize the mental health evaluations of three battered women and analyze them from the differing perspectives of battered women's advocates and mental health clinicians. The first case is that of a woman whose abusive husband ...
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