The book describes the behaviors linked to happiness and explains exactly what love is, in actions. It shows how to overcome depression, a bad temper, grief over a loss, anxieties or worries, fears or phobias, low self-esteem, nervous habits, insomnia, and sexual problems. It helps you decide if a friend or romance is good for you, if your partner would make a compatible husband or wife, if you are ready to become a parent, if you should get a divorce, or if you need professional help for your problems. It explains how to effectively complain without causing anger, how to best deal with someone else's anger, how to improve your social life or find a romance, and how to keep your marriage strong or improve or save it. For divorcing parents, it details how to make the divorce easier on your children and how to make custody decisions. Other sections teach how to get over the past, learn from your dreams, and comfort a dying person. One part describes how to help a suicidal friend and the signs counselors use to determine the risk of suicide. Parents can learn how to often avoid the need for discipline, the best ways to deal with toilet training, thumb sucking, nail biting, stuttering, profanity, lying, stealing, and teenage problems, and how to protect their children from sexual abuse without being sexually explicit.
Women can learn how to prevent rape, including date rape. The book describes the most effective responses to child abuse, woman abuse, sexual harassment, or rape. Surprisingly, going in a battered women's shelter doesn't really help unless the woman takes other steps to change things. Abusers' counseling programs often don't help at all and may actually increase your risk by leading to a false sense of security. Arresting the man may or may not help, depending on the type of man. Couple's therapy without a clear focus on a partner's violence is dangerous because discussing difficult and emotional issues can easily lead to violence.
Psychology Made Easy is packed with useful ideas and a bargain compared to one session of counseling. By cross-referencing between related areas and general techniques, deceptively short chapters add up to comprehensive instructions for each issue. Chapters end with more resources: the best new books on each topic, national support groups (both phone numbers and Internet addresses), and hotline numbers. Because personal problems are often interrelated, the wide range of topics breaks the tradition of a narrow focus in self-help psychology books in order to see the larger picture.
The book contains up-to-date critiques of controversies in psychology, such as how counseling can cause multiple personality, electroshock therapy, the often foolish labeling of psychological diagnoses, and ineffective types of psychotherapy. You can learn how to choose a good counselor. Psychology Made Easy also details surprising facts about what does and doesn't work in preventing violence, crime, and drug use, including how government policies cause much crime and waste massive resources on ineffective programs when we know other programs work much better.
