Customer Reviews

Double Bind

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Double Bind is an absolutely captivating mystery with a unique plot and an imaginative, yet realistic, set of characters. At the same time, Cohen-Cole manages to tackle and bring to light a terrible, violent "professional" practice that breaks, rather than heals, psychiatric patients. By making public the practice of restraint and seclusion, through such an absorbing novel, the author has already begun the movement towards the eradication of this practice.

Double Bind adds credence to the concerns that many professionals within the field of "mental health," in general, have. The problem, as explicated by Cohen-Cole, of neurophysiological degeneration that occurs as a consequence of the use of seclusion and restraints is, in itself, telling, and indicates that such practices are, at best, annihilative of clients' ego structures. One need only consider more subtle practices that are also applied to coerce patients toward compliance to come to grips with the gravity of this issue and to more expeditiously move toward the cessation of the use of restraints and seclusion, used, at best, as a punitive measure. Dr. Kernberg, himself, could be consulted in this matter, as it is his practice par excellence, most apparently, to aim toward "breaking" hospitalized patients with intent to thereafter much more facilely manipulate and control them without regard for their welfare or psychological well-being.