An intriguing look at how mental processes affect and alter our views—and feelings—of health and illness.
Feeling out of sorts? Take two imaginary aspirin and call us in the morning.
Trained in both neurology and clinical neurophysiology, British doctor O’Sullivan sometimes strays from both fields to enter the realm of psychology and the within-mind processes that can make an otherwise healthy person feel very sick indeed. As she writes, her early experiences came in a study of people with epilepsy who were not responding to standard treatments—not responding, it turns out, because 70 percent of them were not really suffering from epilepsy but instead from psychological troubles. “And each person I encountered had a story to tell,” she writes, “and too often that story was one of a journey through the hospital system that led them to no satisfactory understanding of what was wrong.” In all this, long-ignored standards become relevant anew, and diagnosis by way of analysis becomes ever more critical, since, as the author notes, people themselves are rather untrustworthy witnesses to and interpreters of their own experience—and “distressed, frightened people are more unreliable still.” Blending well-spun anecdote with a gently worn survey of the current medical art, O’Sullivan examines the strengths and weaknesses of approaches to psychosomatic disorders (which “are noteworthy for how little respect they have for any single part of the body”) and stress-related neuroses and illnesses, some of them rare, some of them so commonplace that we scarcely notice whether someone has them or not; some “somatic symptom disorders” happen as a result of readily identifiable trauma, but some are not obvious and even secretive. As a result, the author concludes, just as there is no single cause of psychosomatic illness, neither is there a single cure. “To look for one,” she notes, “is akin to looking for the cure for unhappiness.”
An intriguing look at how mental processes affect and alter our views—and feelings—of health and illness.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-795-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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