An absorbing and bravely confrontational look at psychiatry; likely to stir controversy.
A practitioner explores the shortcomings of modern psychiatry.
Brooks, a psychiatric practitioner who has served as clinical director of two mental health services, uses this debut to excoriate psychiatry, suggesting that it “hopelessly confuses a variety of major concepts and classes of things.” He lays out his argument in a book consisting of five parts and written in a scholarly style that resembles an academic textbook. Part 1 represents an indictment of psychiatry itself and the way in which it mistakenly classifies legitimate mental disorders, in the author’s opinion. One of the primary villains, writes Brooks, is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association. The author spends considerable time lambasting the DSM, using specific examples of its perceived deficiencies. He views the DSM “as having been more a cause than part of the solution of psychiatry’s problems in the last forty years.” He takes issue with more than this manual alone; he also discusses at length “the relative failure of psychiatry to make progress in understanding and treating the disorders in its clinical field.” Some of the more intriguing discussions in this section concern commonly held perceptions of schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. Part 2 of the book combines a survey of the history of psychiatry with a comprehensive review of the thinking of numerous philosophers and neuroscientists on the subject. Part 3 focuses heavily on evolution as it relates to psychiatry. Parts 2 and 3 are perhaps the densest and most detailed parts, reading more like a scientific thesis than a book. In Part 4, Brooks argues that psychiatry “is mindless in that it has failed to think about its own beliefs in any deep way.” He reiterates the notion that several mental conditions have been misclassified as a “brain disease.” Part 5, consisting of one chapter, effectively summarizes the work’s contents. Clearly intended for academics and practitioners, the writing is pedantic and even ponderous at times. Still, the volume is scrupulously researched, and the author’s opinions are deftly articulated.
An absorbing and bravely confrontational look at psychiatry; likely to stir controversy. (bibliography)Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 320
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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