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
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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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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