An eye-opening look at how a singular theory of depression has pervaded and persuaded the medical world.
In this first of three planned volumes, an Irish doctor and psychotherapist discusses the lack of scientific evidence for a long-held, widespread theory of depression.
Lynch (Beyond Prozac, 2001, etc.) provides hundreds of quotes from multiple sources—from the American Psychiatric Association, highly respected physicians, drug companies, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Mayo Clinic, just to name a few—that promote the idea that decreased levels of serotonin in the brain is the biological cause of depression. Lynch clearly and painstakingly analyzes and breaks down their arguments, refuting the claims based on his conviction that “There is no reliable scientific evidence…that brain chemical imbalances are known to be a feature of depression” and that “we do not know what serotonin levels should or should not be.” He includes several admirable, fervent missives to various editors at publishing companies whose medical textbooks include the theory of chemical imbalances, as well as to medical journals that espouse the same claims. Lynch’s basic complaint is that the authorities that the public deems trustworthy—such as government organizations, physicians, and scientists—have wittingly or unwittingly bamboozled them about the causes and appropriate treatments for depression. Consequently, he says, “The development of a comprehensive holistic understanding of depression has been thwarted.” The author also discusses how pharmaceutical companies, psychiatrists, and general practitioners have profited from the chemical imbalance theory and asserts that the psychological phenomenon of “Groupthink” has enabled the theory to become intractable. The author’s prodigious citations create a solid case for his beliefs. However, they eventually become a little too overwhelming, as his refutations of the chemical-imbalance concept grow wearingly repetitive. Still, this shouldn’t dissuade readers from delving into this scrupulous study of a topic that holds profound consequences for so many people.
An eye-opening look at how a singular theory of depression has pervaded and persuaded the medical world.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1908561015
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mental Health Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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