An urgent, balanced, eye-opening plea for mental health care reform.
An alarming report on the dire state of our nation’s mental health care industry.
Citing the multibillion-dollar budget cuts after the 2008 recession, increasingly overloaded community clinics, the dangers of drug-based outpatient Medicaid programs, and the impending repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Washington Monthly contributing editor Levine presents a foreboding look at the status of contemporary mental health care in the United States. The author delivers the statistics in a harrowing introductory chapter that spotlights the dangers lurking in the “low quality and sometimes deadly care” that is becoming the standard for those seeking treatment. Levine reinforces his pleas for reform with profiles and true stories of everyone from young children to military vets with PTSD to nursing home communities, all left at the mercy of mental illness by a health care system rampant with weak regulatory oversight, maltreatment, and reckless off-label drug prescriptions. With scores of victims remaining oversedated and often neglected by an inferior, “out-of-control, profit-driven” network, the decades of appeals for reform Levine cites duly reflect just how “little has fundamentally changed in how we treat people with serious mental illness.” The author also expertly probes the Veterans Administration’s “secret history” of deadly wait times and scandalous incompetence, the dangerous marketing schemes surrounding the bipolar medication Seroquel, and the Los Angeles County women’s jail, where 20 percent of inmates suffer from some form of “serious” mental illness. Counterbalancing his own dystopian view, Levine introduces us to the advocates hard at work improving and enhancing the industry and thereby restoring the lives of those affected by its shortcomings. Amid a surfeit of drug company scandals, lawsuits, and blatant wrongdoings, Levine’s compelling exposée brings the contemporary state of mental health care into stark focus. But it also fairly offers redemption and hope in the form of modern-day heroes armed with proactive recovery programs and alternative therapies.
An urgent, balanced, eye-opening plea for mental health care reform.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0837-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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