Sure packs a wallop.
An absorbing, sometimes harrowing history of the medical treatment of the mentally ill in the US, from its roots in England—think Bedlam—to the present, and a scorching indictment of the status quo.
Whitaker, a science reporter for the Boston Globe, does a bang-up job of showing how treatment of the mad has reflected society’s changing political views and philosophical values. He recounts how the 18th-century European view that the mentally ill were beasts to be subdued and tamed led to fearfully harsh treatment, whereas in the early 19th century, the Quaker perspective that the mentally ill were fellow human beings deserving of empathy, resulted in humane therapy emphasizing gentle kindness and the comforts of a good home. In the 20th century, the eugenics movement in the US, which saw the mentally ill as hereditary defectives without rights, led to brain-damaging therapies—insulin coma, metrazol-induced seizure, electroshock, and prefrontal lobotomy—that were applied without the consent of patients and robbed them of the part of the mind that made them human. In the 1950s, chlorpromazine was introduced as a chemical lobotomy, useful for making disruptive patients sluggish and manageable. However, Whitaker points out, under the influence of pharmaceutical-industry marketing efforts, it and other neuroleptics came to be seen as safe and effective antischizophrenic drugs, a view that not only benefited drug companies financially but gave psychiatry the status of a scientific discipline and provided states a rationale for discharging medicated patients from overcrowded public mental hospitals. Whitaker argues that far from being effective, neuroleptics induce pathological conditions by causing irreversible brain damage. He cites World Health Organization studies showing that in countries where doctors do not keep their schizophrenic patients on neuroleptics—India, Niger, Colombia—recovery rates are dramatically higher than in the US. And according to the author, the hubris of the American medical community makes change unlikely.
Sure packs a wallop.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7382-0385-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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