A scathing look at a crisis that can no longer be ignored and a heartfelt call to demand change.
A veteran psychiatrist casts a spotlight on America’s failing mental health care system.
Rosenlicht untangles the knot that is health care in America and proposes a framework for a new system that embraces physical and mental health as one. Throughout the book, he immerses readers in today’s mental health crisis, providing shocking statistics about the nation’s homeless population, who are seen and yet go unacknowledged. “As I negotiate bodies and human feces on our downtown sidewalks, endure petty crime, and see people who cycle in and out of jail, I can only shake my head in disgust,” he writes—and his disgust is not for the hapless people roaming the streets because they don’t get the help they need. He blames the divide of physical and mental health care defined by insurance companies that focus on increased profits over improved lives. In a for-profit health care system that is ready to drop the seriously ill due to the cost of coverage, he’s not surprised that mental health care has turned into a morass of inadequate coverage, insurmountable costs, and zero follow-through for those most in need. “I’ve seen a constant rotisserie of scams, evasions, contracts, rule bending and obfuscation as health insurers avoid paying for care, pharmaceutical companies charge the most they can get away with, and healthcare systems compete for healthy and wealthy clients who need little care…all while doing everything they can to avoid the poor, and the truly sick, especially the mentally ill.” The very titles assigned to people—caregivers or doctors as “providers” and patients as “clients”—reveal that the health care system is so rooted in a business model that it seems impossible to find a way out. But Rosenlicht offers glimpses of hope, reminding readers that people continue to fight for a better system in America that encompasses all citizens, with emphasis on care, not profit.
A scathing look at a crisis that can no longer be ignored and a heartfelt call to demand change.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781639367306
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
