A fine study of desperate patients and the shrinks who failed them.
The psychiatric establishment blew it on one of the most important mental illnesses, according to this academic treatise.
Shorter (What Psychiatry Left Out of the DSM-5, 2015), a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, and Fink (Electroshock, 2008), a psychiatrist at Stony Brook University medical school, investigate the vexed history of catatonia, a terrifying mental disorder with a panoply of bizarre symptoms. Catatonic patients can fall into a stupor, staring fixedly into space while frozen into rigid postures for hours on end, refusing to talk, eat, or comply with any request; make strange, repetitive motions and grimaces; or burst into violence and self-mutilation. Though outwardly uncommunicative, sufferers are often alert and feel a sense of extraordinary fear during catatonic episodes, and not without reason—in extreme cases, victims have been mistaken for corpses and buried alive. Catatonia was identified as a distinct disease in 1874, but the psychiatric mainstream during most of the 20th century, the authors contend, incorrectly characterized it as a subtype of schizophrenia, with tragic results. Schizophrenic patients with catatonia were given drugs that were ineffective or made things worse while other cases often went undiagnosed—even though successful treatments, through drugs and electroshock, had been available since the 1930s. Shorter and Fink offer a probing, well-informed, and very readable account of the arcane theorizing and factional struggles by which psychiatrists hashed out a consensus on catatonia, schizophrenia, and other psychic ailments, one that’s enriched with dozens of intriguing case studies. (One patient snapped out of his immobility only when told he was pitching a baseball game, a task he dutifully undertook in the hospital hallway; another did somersaults for weeks until she died.) Their scholarly approach doesn’t preclude colorful opinionating. They write that catatonia “was kidnapped by dementia praecox and schizophrenia, the Bonnie and Clyde of the diagnosis world”; disparage the concept of schizophrenia itself as “a wastebasket for the unclassifiable and untreatable”; and dismiss the whole of Freudian psychoanalysis as “an obscure offshoot of speculative philosophy.” The result is an engrossing portrait of a fearsome and fascinating disease and a searching inquiry into the ways in which doctors misunderstand the mind.
A fine study of desperate patients and the shrinks who failed them.Pub Date: July 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-088119-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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