A well-told story fraught with both mystery and real-life aftershocks that set the psychiatric community on its ear.
A sharp reexamination of one of the defining moments in the field of psychiatry.
“There are not, as of this writing, any consistent objective measures that can render a definitive psychiatric diagnosis,” writes New York Post journalist Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, 2012) at the beginning of this gripping account of a study that rocked the foundational concepts of how we judge sanity. In the early 1970s, David Rosenhan, a Stanford professor of psychology, sent eight sane people into hospitals for the insane in an experiment involving diagnostics and conditions for the mentally ill. The eight participants told the intake doctors that they were experiencing aural hallucinations, and they were all admitted for varying lengths of time. The resulting article, which appeared in Science, is credited with helping to change both diagnostic and hospitalization procedures. At first, Cahalan approaches the article, “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973), with a level of awe and appreciation and treats readers to a tour of the miseries that patients endured—most notably, isolation and dehumanization—as well as a review of her own misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Eventually, doubts start to creep into the author’s investigation, discrepancies that a purportedly scientific article should not have contained: lying about hospitalization dates, exaggerating medical records, playing with numbers, and more. Cahalan follows all the leads like a bloodhound, in particular trying to uncover the identities of the patients. Her pursuit reads like a well-tempered mystery being picked apart, with tantalizing questions for which many of the answers are just out of reach. While “On Being Sane” may have been partially fabricated, it was also an important force in the deinstitutionalization of care for the mentally ill. Cahalan draws a vivid and critical picture of Rosenhan and the ramifications of his most prominent work.
A well-told story fraught with both mystery and real-life aftershocks that set the psychiatric community on its ear.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1528-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
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