John Suler's Teaching Clinical Psychology
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Books and Manuals
Listed below are the books and manuals I created for teaching undergraduate courses related to clinical psychology.
Psychology of the Digital Age: Humans Become Electric (Cambridge University Press)
A book I wrote for a course on cyberpsychology, the study of how people think, feel, and behave in digital environments, especially social media.
This manual for a course on cyberspsychology (how people think, feel, and behave in online environments) includes a sample syllabus, student exercises, and online resources (pdf).
I want my students to get as realistic an understanding as possible of what it's like to be a practicing psychologist. In my novel Madman, I try to accomplish this by describing the life of a psychology intern working in a psychiatric unit, including his relationships with the patients and staff, and his struggles to understand the virtues, but also the limitations, of psychology.
Photographic psychology is the study of how people create, share, and react to images in the age of cyberspace and digital photography. My online book explores this integration of psychology and photography, with an emphasis on how images can be used to express essential concepts about human psychology.
I firmly believe in the importance of integrating psychoanalytic ideas with views from Eastern philosophy, especially concerning religion and spirituality. It can be a truly rewarding multicultural education for psychology students. This book is the culmination of my thoughts on this integration.
Graduate school and careers in psychology is a complex topic. This manual answers some commonly asked questions, especially concerning careers in mental health and psychotherapy.
Either as an ongoing in-class project, or as an activity outside of class, students can work on exploring and interpreting their dreams. I use this manual as a supplement to our in-class discussions on this topic. Here is a pdf file that contains another version of this manual. The circulating papers technique is another excellent method for helping students work with dreams.
A comprehensive manual for an upper level undergraduate course where students participate in ongoing task and process-oriented groups for the purpose of understanding oneself and interpersonal relationships.
In eQuest projects, students conduct online research and participate in a variety of online activities in order to better understand and perhaps resolve some issue that is important in their lives.
In Photographic Psychology projects, students conduct research on how individuals differ in creating, sharing, and reacting to images, especially in online enviroments and using digital photography. As a form of participant-observation research, it involves both a subjective and objective analysis of information.
Eastern tales from Zen Buddhism and Taoism are great teaching tools and stimuli for class discussion. They highlight many basic human issues about life, death, and everything of importance in between. This collection of stories also includes people's reactions to the stories.
Coauthored with Richard Zakia, this book covers a comprehensive range of topics about how to create, interpret, and share photographs, with an emphasis on a psychological approach to understanding the perception and meaning of all types of images. Some of the topics include figure/ground relationships, negative space, camera angles, gestalt grouping, memory and association, conceptual photography, the perception of time and movement, the decisive moment, color perception, black and white photography, sharpness and blur, illusions and ambiguity, subliminals, body language, how personality style affects photography, mindfulness in photography, self-portraits, how to critique photographs, photosharing in social media, therapeutic photography... and more! The Taylor and Francis site contains additional information about the book, including a detailed table of contents. And here's an exercise manual (pdf) to accompany the book.
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