reviews: clinical reading for refugee clinic

I have been doing outside reading for my work at the refugee clinic and thought I would outline what I found to be the most helpful books to date.  These are books that I found to be exceptionally helpful clinically regarding the physical and mental consequences of detention and torture, which are unfortunately very common experiences within the population that we see.

The very best book I have read is Metin Basoglu's Torture and Its Consequences: Current Treatment Approaches.  While many books have inspiring stories or lay the background for why political persecution occurs, this book actually explains its acute and chronic health repercussions as well as the pathophysiology behind them. 

The other book was The Mental Health Consequences of Torture  edited by Ellen T. Gerrity.  This has the clearest and most helpful description of the pathophysiology behind post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that I have yet seen.  It also has some incredibly useful information about the long-term consequences of torture for survivors, families, and communities, devoting entire chapters to specific conflicts such the Holocaust and other lesser-known conflicts.  It also has an amazing chapter by a survivor of torture who later became an advocate, which gave the book a very compassionate feel very different than the clinical detachment, aloofness, or even irrelevance of many similar books.

I would not recommend reading these books in large doses or late at night.  While these were written as clinical resource material and included only relevant mini-case studies, there was still enough detail to be disturbing because there is no way that one can describe the health consequences of torture without describing what was done.  There were certainly moments when reading these books where I finally understood what it meant to have one's stomach churn in revulsion - not at what people suffered, but at the fact that human beings could so inventively come up with ways to damage and destroy other human beings.  Nevertheless, these books are primarily clinical and didactic, and ask such do not include material for gratuitous shock value (something I really appreciated as the chapters went on).  They have been incredibly useful in clinic and something I would recommend to anyone interested in working with people who have suffered extreme trauma.