A freelance journalist delves into what has been called a giant uncontrolled experiment using America’s children as guinea pigs.
As a member of this group herself, Barnett explores the issues faced by the first generation of children, now entering adulthood, who were treated with psychopharmaceutical drugs from the time they were youngsters. For the past two decades, American children have been increasingly prescribed psychiatric medications for a rainbow of conditions including depression, attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and more general behavioral problems. The author notes most of the drugs “were and still are prescribed to children and teens without official FDA approval for the relevant condition and age group.” Childcare books during this period categorized kids with these issues as difficult or problem children, whose behaviors unsettled not just their family but became “a threat to the entire family dynamic that needed to be addressed and dealt with.” A new class of drugs developed during the 1990s, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) held out the hope of relief, if not a miracle cure. During this period, the FDA allowed pharmaceutical companies direct access to consumers through TV advertising. Barnett tackles this complex saga by chronicling the stories of five individuals who were medicated as youngsters, weaving their narratives together with a learned discussion of psychiatric treatments, medical models, side effects breakdowns, and the numerous issues faced when medicated children attend school. The author began her research after reading an article about a woman in her 30s, who, having been on medication since she was 14, wondered how drugs “had shaped her psychological development and ultimately her identity.” The woman’s psychiatrist noted that his patient was just one of many who raised this question. Occasionally Barnett, who began taking Prozac when she was 17, adds her point of view to the discussion. The author’s clear rendering of the tough questions surrounding this knotty topic should make it required reading for anyone touched by this issue.
Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0134-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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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