Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard Until a Therapist Listened
Hayden was working as a special ed teacher and needed a break. With her psychiatric training and specialization in "elective mutism," she was cajoled into working for a hospital-based psychiatric crisis and assessment unit. She begins this book with the story of a girl who was only six when she was abducted by her father; returned to her home two years later, she alternated long stretches of silence with lying and sexual accusations. Hayden was then asked to assess a delightful preschool boy whose voice no one had ever heard except his mother; his belligerent grandfather ordered Hayden to "fix" the boy's problem. Then she was called to observe an elderly woman who'd had a stroke that may have rendered her unable to speak. Gradually, the woman began to recount girlhood memories to Hayden--who thus knew she was still lucid--but would that satisfy the doctors who wanted to send her to a nursing home? Each case unfolds like a detective story, with Hayden piecing together the mystery of the silences from the various clues she gleans. Besides being a delightful raconteur, Hayden is also a very gentle, very sensible therapist. Yes, her patient is dissociating, but that's normal, we all do it--the real question is, "at what point on the continuum does it move from being resourceful and helpful to maladaptive and damaging?" This is a compulsively readable book.Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.