An important, insightful book explaining how society became a vortex of mental illness and offering possible remedies.
A sweeping examination of the roots of today’s mental illness epidemic.
Gabor Maté, a doctor who specializes in addiction treatment, is the author of the acclaimed 2008 book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. In his latest, co-written with his son, composer and lyricist Daniel, he casts a wider net, investigating why an increasing number of people are suffering from mental and physical illnesses. “Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two,” write the authors, who sees two overlapping layers to the problem. The first is that traumas—a term he defines widely—are going unrecognized and untreated. Combined with the stress of modern life, the result is that many people retreat into addictive medication, which often causes or exacerbates physical ailments. Once, these mental strains were addressed by communal activities and personal connections, but those remedies are vanishing in the digital age. The second level is the economic organization of techno-capitalism, which creates conditions of inequality, reclusiveness, and manipulation. Taken together, these issues create a yawning gap between how people live and how their biology wants them to live. “A society that fails to value communality…is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human,” write the authors. They believe that individuals must accept their traumas in order to move past them and toward true healing. Stress, alienation, and isolation should be denormalized. At the sociopolitical level, the authors acknowledge that they do not have any simple answers, although making the medical, legal, and teaching professions more humanistic would be a good start. At more than 500 pages, the text demands attention and reflection, but it repays the effort, giving readers much to ponder.
An important, insightful book explaining how society became a vortex of mental illness and offering possible remedies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-08388-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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