ABSTRACT
The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive resource on the exposure of individuals, families, and communities in various phases of the life cycle to diverse types of stressor events, in various socio-cultural contexts, the negative and positive effects of such exposure, and ways to address them. Stress, crisis, and trauma have been studied for at least a century and their study has expanded in scope from physiological study of sympathetic responses, to cellular mechanisms, gene expressions, animal models, and human experimental and intervention studies. Capturing these multiple dimensions is challenging given the amount of relevant knowledge and the complexity of the issues. An internet search yields more than 10,000,000 hits for “family stress” and 9,000,000 hits for “trauma” and these numbers are increasing exponentially. Furthermore, definitions of and criteria for what constitutes stress and trauma are constantly changing as reflected in the relevant sections of the DSM-V (APA, 2013) and the forthcoming 2015 ICD-11. Clearly, no book can report about all that has been written in the field. Most available books have focused on a specific population group (e.g. children), a specific type of stressful event (e.g. disaster) or a specific type of intervention. The main principle that guided me in developing this book was an effort to present in a reader-friendly manner a picture of what we know to help practitioners navigate the overwhelming amount of theoretical, empirical, and clinical knowledge available.
