This book offers a unique glimpse into the startlingly complex world of acute children's psychiatry through 12 chapters, each inspired by the actual visit of a child in psychiatric crisis to one of the most well-known psychiatric emergency rooms in the nation. Suicide by Security Blanket, and Other Stories from the Child Psychiatry Emergency Service: What Happens to Children with Acute Mental Illness takes the reader inside the child psychiatry emergency room at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Each chapter highlights both the child's dilemma and the doctors' thought processes, and stresses the elements of rapid assessment. The real-life patient stories also offer myriad teaching points about child development and the warning signs of illness, and provide compelling lessons regarding types of interactions with school systems, health care systems, and family systems. Each individual story presents the breadth and depth of the child psychiatric emergency evaluation at MGH, from initial assessment to disposition, presenting a genuine glimpse into the children's psychiatric emergency room at one of the nation's most famous psychiatric departments. This book demonstrates vividly how even the best-intentioned communities can fail to offer services to their neediest families. Each story presents a fascinating glimpse into the complex and sometimes tragic world of child psychiatry on the front lines.

In Maya Daykeeping, three divinatory calendars from highland Guatemala - examples of a Mayan literary tradition that includes the Popul Vuh, Annals of the Cakchiquels, and the Titles of the Lords of Totonicapan - dating to 1685, 1722, and 1855, are transcribed in K'iche or Kaqchikel side-by-side with English translations. Calendars such as these continue to be the basis for prognostication, determining everything from the time for planting and harvest to foreshadowing illness and death. Good, bad, and mixed fates can all be found in these examples of the solar calendar and the 260-day divinatory calendar. The use of such calendars is mentioned in historical and ethnographic works, but very few examples are known to exist. Each of the three calendars transcribed and translated by John M. Weeks, Frauke Sachse, and Christian M. Prager - and housed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology - is unique in structure and content. Moreover, except for an unpublished study of the 1722 calendar by Rudolf Schuller and Oliver La Farge (1934), these little-known works appear to have escaped the attention of most scholars. Introductory essays contextualize each document in time and space, and a series of appendixes present previously unpublished calendrical notes assembled in the early twentieth century. Providing considerable information on the divinatory use of calendars in colonial highland Maya society previously unavailable without a visit to the University of Pennsylvania's archives, Maya Daykeeping is an invaluable primary resource for Maya scholars. Mesoamerican Worlds Series

"This is a book of Suicide by Security Blanket, and Other Stories from the Child Psychiatry Emergency Service - What Happens to Children with Acute Mental Illness"--Provided by publisher.