Comprehensive Women’s Mental Health

Comprehensive Women's Health provides the reader with an extensive and rich explanation of mental health issues affecting special populations and diverse cultures. The first chapter, “Surviving Their Lives, Women's Mental Health in Context,” does a fine job explaining the purpose of the book: “The evidence presented in this chapter makes a strong case for concluding that mental health practitioners need to understand women's distress in the context of the complexity of their lives and with an appreciation of the ways gender, ethnicity and other social inequalities affect service responses. In short, they need to take a gender-informed approach to working with women” (p. 7). This book is appropriate for use as a textbook, as a reference resource in an academic or hospital library, or further exploration of issues relating to women's mental health.

Professors Castle and Abel have arranged the book, written by various specialists in the field, into twenty-five chapters that are organized in five sections. The first section covers the social, genetic, and environmental aspects. Chapters one through seven form this section and cover issues such as the effects of ethnic and cultural differences on mental health care, women as caregivers (an important distinction given that “Throughout the world, women are the primary providers of care and support to the chronically ill” [p. 28]), maternal caregiving, and developmental disorders in girls.

Hormonal and reproductive effects are the focus of the second section. Issues considered are the effects of hormones on the female brain; sexual, reproductive, and antenatal care of women with mental illness; mood; anxiety; and compulsive disorders in pregnancy and how to treat them. This section strongly asserts a need for change in the organizational response by mental health service providers and policy makers: “Sexual and reproductive health must be addressed within policies and training; sexual safety needs to be considered alongside physical safety” (p. 92).

The third section explores the sex differences in borderline personality disorder (BPD), women offenders and mental health, and women and addiction. Chapter 13 is the most engaging chapter in this section because it thoroughly covers the characteristics of women offenders: what distinguishes them from men and ways of understanding their needs. The chapter authors also discuss treatment interventions, both in and out of prison, and how to gain a greater understanding of this special population.

The fourth section talks about depression, anxiety and related disorders, and psychotic disorders in women. One of the more interesting chapters in this section discusses the cultural impact on body image in women. Although there has been an oversaturation of this subject in much of the media, this chapter digs deep and has given me a rooted understanding of the psychological underpinnings of body dysmorphic disorder. Chapter 17 reveals surprising statistics about how many women are afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): “One of the most influential of these studies, the National Comorbidity Study (NCS), estimated that the lifetime prevalence of trauma exposure was 51% and 61% for men; however, lifetime rates of PTSD were estimated at 10% for women and 5% for men” (p. 209).

The fifth and last section examines psychotic disorders in women, focusing two chapters on schizophrenia and one on the special issues associated with BPD. The BPD chapter looks at reproductive health for patients with BPD, management of BPD in pregnancy, and management of BPD in the postpartum period. Chapter 22 deals with how prevalent schizophrenia is in women, how it presents itself to clinicians, and what the broader issues are for mothers with schizophrenia. The next chapter explores the various treatments available to women with schizophrenia. The book concludes with an exhaustive chapter on dementia in women, asserting that more women than men develop dementia, but they also are “disproportionately affected by virtue of being caregivers to others with dementia. In the United States, 65–75% of caregivers are women” (p. 342).

The reader who is eager to learn more about each topic and the collection development librarian will delight in the fact that all chapters conclude with an exhaustive list of cited works. But what I appreciate most about this book is that it pays attention to special populations like lesbian women, women of color, aging and elderly women, and incarcerated women, which exemplifies to me its status as comprehensive. This book would be a trusted addition to any library collection as a textbook about mental health issues or as a reference resource.