An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.
Psychiatrist Torrey (The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens, 2008, etc.) returns to the battleground of reform with another book about the inability of government agencies and private institutions to care well for the severely mentally ill.
The author names individuals who, in his opinion, are responsible for the disaster of mental health care across the United States. Here, Torrey focuses more on the historical reasons for the sad situation, with special emphasis on the family of President John F. Kennedy. Since Kennedy's sister Rosemary was developmentally disabled and increasingly unstable as she aged, the new president had a high awareness of hidden mental illness problems. But his push for federal mental illness legislation, however well-intended, dismantled the state-based mental hospital system without sensible alternatives in place. As a result, Torrey explains, what became known as "deinstitutionalization" placed tens of thousands of severely mentally ill patients in communities entirely unprepared to care for them. Torrey excoriates the leadership at the National Institute for Mental Health for their inability to anticipate the disaster and subsequent failure to admit their mistakes and take corrective action. After devoting about two-thirds of the text to the historical record, Torrey offers a chapter titled "Dimensions of the Present Disaster, 2000-2013,” in which he lucidly explains how community jails and state prisons have become the new centers for warehousing severely mentally ill individuals. The final chapter is filled with sensible recommendations that could be funded by current misguided expenditures that Torrey estimates at about $140 billion annually. The author makes clear that the solutions will require not only vast funding, but also a long-term commitment by trained caregivers, plus family members who insist that their mentally ill relatives be committed to institutions when dangerous to themselves and innocent bystanders.
An important book by a refreshingly candid author who shares his vast knowledge in the interests of the needy.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-998871-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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