Holocaust Survivors' Mental Health

A handbook for practitioners in the field, Holocaust Survivors’Mental Health gives clinicians practical tools for assessment and therapy for working with aged Holocaust survivors.

The now aging survivors of the Holocaust may be encountering geriatric challenges to their mental health. In this eye-opening book, readers discover how some survivors maintain their mental health by sharing their experiences in frequent testimonials while others employ the defense mechanisms of denial and avoidance. Clinicians will see how these differences in coping styles became painfully evident in how some Israeli aged responded in the recent Gulf War.

Holocaust Survivors’Mental Health reviews mental health issues relevant to Holocaust survivors and their families. The authors, many of them based in Israel, stress the importance of different coping styles and therapeutic techniques. They provide guidelines for community-based long-term care and family therapy. Yiddish and Hebrew translations are included for major psychological tests.

The authors foster the understanding of psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, and rabbis of how the uncovery of repressed material via hypnotherapy may be appropriate in some survivors’cases, while other cases of paranoia and depression may require supportive, empathic, or transferential therapy, which serves to strengthen the Holocaust survivors’defenses. As therapeutic intervention must be tailored to the needs and constraints of the individual patient, this handbook provides enough detail of Holocaust survivors’experiences to make practitioners understand the various approaches therapeutic intervention can take with these survivors.