by Katherine Sharpe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2012
A knowing account of what it is like to grow up on psychiatric medications.
After a 20-minute session with a counselor during college, former scienceblogs.com editor Sharpe was prescribed Zoloft, and for most of the next 10 years she continued on antidepressants. That experience was not unusual in her generation, nor is it among young people today. The author questions the effect of such medication on adolescents who have not yet fully developed a sense of self. Antidepressants, she writes, got her moving, but they failed to give her the sense of direction that talk therapy later provided; she deplores the decline in access to talk therapy, a powerful complement to drug therapy. Sharpe interviewed or corresponded with dozens of other people about their experiences growing up on antidepressants, and their stories reveal a range of reactions. For some, the judgment that they had a chemical imbalance in the brain came as a relief, freeing them from a feeling of blame; for others, it made them feel like freaks. Besides her personal story and those of her interviewees, Sharpe provides a history of antidepressants, a revealing look at the politics behind the evolution of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and an account of the rise of the biomedical model of mental illness, which holds that disorders like depression have biological causes and can be managed with pharmaceuticals. She also analyzes the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies on the demand for antidepressants and the role of health insurance in determining patients’ access to therapy modalities. Balanced and informative—an education for any parent considering psychiatric medication for a troubled adolescent.
Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-205973-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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