Clearly, we could be doing much more to help those with mental illness. This is a thoughtful consideration of what social settings, assistance, and connections would offer the most help to those striving to return to productive, fulfilling lives. Novelist Neugeboren wrote earlier of his brother Robert’s severe, chronic, incapacitating mental illness (Imagining Robert, 1997). Here he relates travels and visits to facilities, and conversations both with mental health care professionals and with those who’ve made it back to a more normal life from severe illness; all undertaken while undergoing a parallel search for a more humane life and home for his brother. Robert Neugeboren has for years lived in locked psychiatric wards, punctuated by brief, unsuccessful forays to hopelessly inadequate community residences. His story and others related here drive home the message that not only is our biological understanding of mental illness grossly incomplete, but that progress in improving care has been distressingly slight. Neugeboren patiently examines a few outstanding facilities (one in New Hampshire, one in the Bronx, N.Y., to which Robert eventually was transferred) and sets out suggestions for an ideal facility. He suggests, in the end, small, community-based assisted living facilities similar to those we now have for the elderly, which could be adjusted for level of care as regressions and remissions occurred and “so that one was not living only with others who suffered from serious mental illness. And cost should be a consideration.” Neugeboren pegs an excellent Boston-area supervised residential program with strong support services to cost between $25,000 and $35,000 per person per year, while “the cost of keeping my brother on a locked ward without anything resembling psychological, vocational or educational counseling—without anythingi that might offer the possibility for a fuller, more productive life outside a hospital—is, according to the New York State Office of Mental Health, $127,000 a year.” An affecting personal story, coupled with a well-supported plea for revolutionizing care.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-15655-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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
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
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