Next book

EMPIRE OF MADNESS

REIMAGINING WESTERN MENTAL HEALTH CARE FOR EVERYONE

An ambitious take on the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues viewed through a cross-cultural lens.

When so many people take psychiatric drugs to survive their circumstances, perhaps something is wrong with society.

In this deeply researched narrative, the author reveals the many aspects of public life—whether in Global North or Global South countries—that influence the mental health of its citizens. Kidia, a writer, physician, and anthropologist, spends half of each year in Zimbabwe, where he was born and raised and now does mental health research, and the other half in the United States, where he attended medical school and now sees patients as a primary care doctor. His unique background affords him fertile ground for picking apart the tangled web of influences on a person’s mental well-being. Kidia shares stories from his life, such as his mother’s nervous breakdowns, his medical training, and his work on community-level interventions. He also tackles the colonial history of Zimbabwe, the link between incarceration and mental illness, and the days when homosexuality (as one example) was a psychiatric diagnosis. The book opens with the story of the “friendship bench,” a place for people to share their burden with (trained) elders. It seems a charming anecdote, until you learn that the intervention proved to be more effective than usual care. The program increased access in a country that, at the time, had only 12 psychiatrists. This story also sets the stage for Kidia’s argument that mental health is determined by a multitude of culturally relevant factors that go well beyond brain chemicals and genetics. He explores structural aspects of society that influence mental health, such as colonialism, income inequality, racism, the criminal justice system, and a culture of productivity. He critiques the evolution of psychiatric care; in the U.S., for instance, people deemed mentally ill have been lobotomized, psychoanalyzed, and institutionalized—strategies that have not stood the test of time. Current treatments rely on medication and talk therapy, which the author asserts are sometimes helpful but largely insufficient. It’s a complex story to tell, and it requires patience and an open mind in the reader. Every time you think the author is going off on a tangent, he succeeds in connecting things back to mental health.

An ambitious take on the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues viewed through a cross-cultural lens.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026

ISBN: 9780593594285

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Next book

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

Close Quickview