Love, Fear, and Health: How Our Attachments to Others Shape Health and Health Care

Commendation Quotes: What an excellent book! Fascinating, scientifically sound, clinically innovative, and gracefully written. While relying on attachment theory research for important applications to the health care field, it opens up topics for further research. It reads quickly and effortlessly because of its lucid prose, engaging author self-disclosures, and efficiently presented, highly instructive case examples. I thoroughly enjoyed it as an attachment researcher, a sometimes patient negotiating today s health care maze, and a fan of good stories about complex real beings. - Phillip R. Shaver, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis"Table of Contents: IntroductionSection One: Vexing Health Care 1. What is Health Care? 2. Why Else Do We Get Sick? 3. Health Happens Between Us Summary of Part OneSection Two: Attachment & Health Introduction to Section Two: What is Attachment? 4. Attachment Sculpts the Brain 5. All Grown Up and Still Attached 6. Feeling secure is Good For You 7. Depression 8. Attachment is a Response to Stress 9. Why Are So Many of Us Fat, Drunk, Stationary Smokers? 10. I Don t Know What You Have But I ve Seen It Before and You Have It Bad 11. Trouble in the Patient-Provider Relationship Summary of Part TwoSection Three: Relational Health Care Introduction to Section Three: Principles of Adaptation and Change 12. How Health Care Providers Can Adapt When Attachment Anxiety Interferes 13. How Health Care Providers Can Adapt When Attachment Avoidance Interferes 14. How Health Care Providers Can Adapt When Fearful Attachment Interferes 15. Changing the System 16. Becoming More Secure 17. Beyond Health Care Relationships: A Wider attachment Perspective on HealthAfterword"Commendation Quotes: Love, Fear, and Health is brilliant. Every health care professional concerned with the psychological well-being of his or her patients should read it. More generally, I recommend this well-written and humane book to anyone concerned to understand why some people are happy and healthy, and others are not. - David Naylor, Professor of Medicine and President Emeritus, University of Toronto"Commendation Quotes: Popular medical science at its very best, Maunder and Hunter s impressive book defies superlatives: readable, accessible, amusing, and profound. The authors show how the evidence-based science of attachment is the key that unlocks the puzzle of chronic illness and illness-promoting behaviours, and how, through understanding the lure and dangers of the ubiquitous weak force of insecure attachment, both can be ameliorated. Hyperbole aside, this is one of those rare books destined to be essential reading for doctors and health workers, at all levels, worldwide, and for years to come. - Jeremy Holmes, Visiting Professor, Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Exeter"Publisher Marketing: Can the way in which we relate to others seriously affect our health? Can understanding those attachments help health care providers treat us better? In Love, Fear, and Health, psychiatrists Robert Maunder and Jonathan Hunter draw on evidence from neuroscience, stress physiology, social psychology, and evolutionary biology to explain how understanding attachment the ways in which people seek security in their close relationships can transform patient outcomes. Using attachment theory, Maunder and Hunter provide a practical, clinically focused introduction to the influence of attachment styles on an individual s risk of disease and the effectiveness of their interactions with health care providers. Drawing on more than fifty years of combined experience as health care providers, teachers, and researchers, they explain in clear language how health care workers in all disciplines can use this knowledge to meet their patients needs better and to improve their health."

Contributor Bio:  Maunder, Robert Robert Maunder is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the head of research in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital. Contributor Bio:  Hunter, Jonathan Jonathan Hunter is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and the head of the consultation-liaison division in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital and the University of Toronto.