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Book Review: Introduction to Clinical Health Psychology

of caring. In the second, substantially shorter part of the book entitled ‘Assessment and Intervention’ the editors gather papers dealing with various approaches such as psychological group approach (Watts and co-workers), support networks, communication groups for carers but also research reports addressing issues of speech therapy and physiotherapy. Finally, there are some chapters on specific issues, such as driving, on patients with Parkinson’s disease (Lincoln and Radford) and action research outlines by Oxtoby, the author of the most influential research project on Parkinson’s disease patients and their needs in UK conducted in the late 1970s. This book is neither a primer on psychological and social issues of Parkinson’s disease nor a classical edited book of academic conference papers. Reading the research reports one is transferred into a community of carers and their supporting institutions and the discourse cultivated in these circles. There is richness of insightful information available in this volume. It monitors the situation in some UK communities and as far as the institutional background is concerned it might not necessarily be generalizable to other places. Nevertheless, the experience of patients, their families and carers, the professionals’ views are very similar to what could be seen in other places but may not be as well documented. Thanks to the Parkinson’s Disease Society, we can look back at 20 years of pragmatic research in the UK offering a good mixture of quantitative and qualitative data missing in many professional publications on the disease. As far as the representation of psychology and health psychology in particular is concerned, more research on Parkinson’s disease is needed. Apart from the general notion on coping we do not find many health psychological conceptualizations, which is unfortunate, as many of the concepts in health psychology can be well communicated in the welfare and carer’s community. More worrying is the lack of attempts to use the opportunity of dealing with Parkinson’s disease by psychologists and to consider the special anchoring of this disease as a disease of goal directed action. In doing so the link of cognitive, motor and social processes which comprise the base of integrative psychological thinking could have been pointed out. This would mean to understand the motor processes beyond tremor and beyond their conceptualization by physiotherapists, the cognitive emotional processes beyond disturbed emotions and depression and the social processes reaching further than the social impact of the caring. The use of reciprocal constructing processes in this disease and of the parallelity of the new WHOICIDH-2 conceptualization of impairment, activity and participation is not very pronounced to put it mildly. However, this wish cannot be seen as a quality measure for this volume. This book can be recommended to everyone who seeks information about and a close contact to the issue of Parkinson’s disease as experienced by the concerned. I certainly ordered another copy for our hospital library.