Barber articulately and persuasively counsels that it’s time to abandon the quick-fix, pop-a-pill approach.
A sharply critical look at the way antidepressants are marketed and prescribed in the United States.
While the mentally ill aren’t receiving the treatment they need, Americans with ordinary life problems are being overmedicated, writes Barber (Psychiatry/Yale School of Medicine; Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors, 2005). Though not a psychiatrist, he has a decade of professional experience working with mentally ill homeless people. He severely criticizes the pharmaceutical industry but places much of the blame on the medical profession, charging that at a time when the understanding of psychiatric drugs remains crude, doctors are too willing to prescribe the pills that patients request after seeing them advertised on television. The author divides the book into two parts. The first provides a capsule history of psychiatry in the United States and examines the shortcomings of the currently ascendant biological, or neuropsychiatric, approach. Barber attacks with shocking statistics (in 2006, 227 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed to Americans, up by 30 million from the 2002 levels) and punchy prose: “Psychiatry [is] jettisoning the impoverished mentally ill for the cash-carrying worried well.” He reserves particular mockery for the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, citing its recent introduction of Motivational Deficiency Disorder as a nonsensical medicalization of laziness. Part Two advocates the use of an alternative, cognitive-behavioral therapy. The author spells out details of two related treatment approaches: the Stages of Change model, which recognizes that change is a dynamic process in which relapse is a realistic part of a continuum; and Motivational Interviewing, in which the therapist uses a technique of empathetic listening that centers on the client’s ambivalence about change.
Barber articulately and persuasively counsels that it’s time to abandon the quick-fix, pop-a-pill approach.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42399-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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