When someone is diagnosed with a serious illness, he or she is taking the first step on a challenging and confusing journey. For many, it is as if they are traveling alone to someplace entirely new, with only faded directions back to their old lives. Often, even their loved ones can only guess at what they must be experiencing. Michael Stein, M.D., uses the stories of his own patients to consider the personal narrative of sickness. Beautifully written and keenly insightful, The Lonely Patient is a valuable book for patients and their caregivers as well as a probing inquiry into this universal experience.

Here is an important new book focusing on the contribution of the therapist's love and empathy to the therapeutic process. Technique without dedication, discipline, and understanding will rarely benefit patients nor help resolve their conflicts. Psychoanalytic Technique demonstrates how the therapist's countertransference feelings, anxieties, wishes, and superego admonitions shape his or her therapeutic interventions.

Social isolation and loneliness are serious yet underappreciated public health risks that affect a significant portion of the older adult population. Approximately one-quarter of community-dwelling Americans aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated, and a significant proportion of adults in the United States report feeling lonely. People who are 50 years of age or older are more likely to experience many of the risk factors that can cause or exacerbate social isolation or loneliness, such as living alone, the loss of family or friends, chronic illness, and sensory impairments. Over a life course, social isolation and loneliness may be episodic or chronic, depending upon an individual's circumstances and perceptions. A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that social isolation presents a major risk for premature mortality, comparable to other risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. As older adults are particularly high-volume and high-frequency users of the health care system, there is an opportunity for health care professionals to identify, prevent, and mitigate the adverse health impacts of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults summarizes the evidence base and explores how social isolation and loneliness affect health and quality of life in adults aged 50 and older, particularly among low income, underserved, and vulnerable populations. This report makes recommendations specifically for clinical settings of health care to identify those who suffer the resultant negative health impacts of social isolation and loneliness and target interventions to improve their social conditions. Social Isolation and Loneliness in Older Adults considers clinical tools and methodologies, better education and training for the health care workforce, and dissemination and implementation that will be important for translating research into practice, especially as the evidence base for effective interventions continues to flourish.

When someone is diagnosed with a serious illness, he or she is taking the first step on a challenging and confusing journey. For many, it is as if they are traveling alone to someplace entirely new, with only faded directions back to their old lives. Often, even their loved ones can only guess at what they must be experiencing. Michael Stein, M.D., uses the stories of his own patients to consider the personal narrative of sickness. Beautifully written and keenly insightful, The Lonely Patient is a valuable book for patients and their caregivers as well as a probing inquiry into this universal experience.

“A gripping, illuminating book . . . Dr. Stein is drawn, in an almost Sherlock Holmesian way, toward trying to fathom and analyze addicts’ behavior. . . . hauntingly and successfully, Stein lets readers make a doctor’s experiences their own.” — New York Times “Beautifully told… [with] great insight, empathy and compassion.” — Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner, My Own Country, and Cutting for Stone The Addict is the powerful and revealing narrative of Dr. Michael Stein’s year-long treatment of a young woman addicted to Vicodin. Dr. Stein has followed up his award winning book The Lonely Patient with “a useful, sensible, and often inspiring guide to how the medical profession does—and should—treat the sick, and the sick at heart.” (Francine Prose, O magazine)

"It would be some time until the steel encasement sealing my lonely nest cracked. Some might say I was too damaged to know any better, having lived with an abuser so long. The truth is hard to accept and far more egregious when I say, we learn to sacrifice the ones we love in order to survive." The secret you buried thirty years ago comes banging at your door. You refuse to open, as you have a new life and remain speechless whenever someone asks, "How did your mother and sister die?" The events described in The Lonely Nest take place in a small New England town and reveal what hides behind time and shame. With a sense of urgency, Concetta Falcone-Codding takes the reader through her family history, narrating four decades of secrets, deadly betrayals, and harm that destroyed the women in her family. Written from the perspective of her child-self, Falcone-Codding's sensitive prose exposes the translucent line between witnessing abuse and being complicit in it. The Lonely Nest is a story of domestic violence, incest, childhood loss, and courage written for all whose stories have yet to be heard. Concetta Falcone-Codding https: //www.facebook.com/TheLonelyNestSeries/ [email protected]

In "Patient Privacy: When It Matters", Dr. Mazer chronicles the history of privacy within the cultural norms of the time and then moves to the current narratives from patients who share their own stories. The question of when patient privacy matters is answered through the lens of the lived experience. "Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients... I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private." (From the Hippocratic Oath, 4th century, B.C.) Patient privacy was first declared in writing by Hippocrates in the 5th century and is often considered the first document to define ethical standards of patient care. Today, while patient privacy remains a mandate for every healthcare professional, it has become enveloped in exceptions many of which are defined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. The analysis identifies both direct and indirect implications for the patient experience.