Puswhisperer: A Year in the Life of an Infectious Disease Doctor


Mark Crislip - 2010
    Spelling and grammar errors go unseen after numerous reading. But then, as Bones might say, Jim, I'm a doctor, not an editor.

Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness


Alisa Roth - 2018
    Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders.In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts


Chris McGreal - 2018
    But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers--resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything


F.S. Michaels - 2011
    One of The Atlantic's best books of the year. As human beings, we've always told stories: stories about who we are, where we come from, and where we're going. Now imagine that one of those stories is taking over the others, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world - your work, your relationships with others and the environment, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity - are changing, or have already changed, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And because how you think shapes how you act, the monoculture isn't just changing your mind - it's changing your life.“A single lucid narrative that’s bound to first make you somewhat uncomfortable and insecure, then give you the kind of pause from which you can step back and move forward with more autonomy, authenticity and mindfulness than ever.” - Maria Popova, BrainPickings“A thin, enrapturing gem. It’s accessible, sensible—exactly the sort of book that should have (and still could + should!) take off and create a tiny little dent in books.” - The Kenyon Review“Michaels offers a smart and realistic guide to first recognizing the monoculture and the challenges of transcending its limitations, then considering ways in which we, as sentient and autonomous individuals, can move past its confines to live a more authentic life within a broader spectrum of human values.” - The Atlantic“5 stars: The cause and effect of our world is more surprising than you’d think. With intriguing notions about the driving ideas of stories in every shape of our life, “Monoculture” is an incredibly fascinating look at how the mind works and today’s consumer culture.” - Midwest Book Review“If you just read one book this year, read this one…You won’t just be considering the narrative of the culture in which you live, you’ll be considering the everyday choices you make in your life. But the best part of the story is that the author affords you the opportunity to pick up your pen and demand a rewrite…A mind-altering work.” - BuriedInPrint.com

Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them


Randy Christensen - 2011
    Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor’s office on wheels. His patients are the city’s homeless adolescents and children. In the shadow of one affluent American city, Dr. Christensen has dedicated his life to caring for society's throwaway kids—the often-abused, unloved children who live on the streets without access to proper health care, all the while fending off constant threats from thugs, gangs, pimps, and other predators. With the Winnebago as his moveable medical center, Christensen and his team travel around the outskirts of Phoenix, attending to the children and teens who need him most. With tenderness and humor, Dr. Christensen chronicles everything from the struggles of the van’s early beginnings, to the support system it became for the kids, and the ultimate recognition it has achieved over the years. Along with his immense professional challenges, he also describes the trials and joys he faces while raising a growing family with his wife Amy. By turns poignant, heartbreaking, and charming, Dr. Christensen's story is a gripping and rich memoir of his work and family, one of those rare books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System


Raj Patel - 2007
    It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea.What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

The Price of Civilization


Jeffrey D. Sachs - 2010
    Sachs has been at the forefront of international problem solving. But Sachs turns his attention back home in 'The Price of Civilization,' a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country's economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtue of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity." Inside book cover comments.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS


Elizabeth Pisani - 2008
    With swashbuckling wit and fierce honesty, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most—drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns.Pisani chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough. With verve and clarity, she shows the general reader how her profession really works; how easy it is to draw wrong conclusions from "objective" data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very badly. "Exhibit A": the 45 billion taxpayer dollars the Bush administration is committing to international AIDS programs.

Sociopath: Inside the Mind of a Sociopath


Paul Sorensen - 2014
    * * *Download for FREE on Kindle Unlimited + Free BONUS Inside!* * *From the ~Personality Disorders and Mental Illnesses~ collection and the award winning writer, Paul Sorensen, comes a masterful explanation into the mind of a sociopath! "An excellent depiction of the modern day sociopath!" - Alex Lemmings, Book CritiqueThink of sociopaths, and what’s the first thing that enters your mind? The soulless murderer, lurking in the shadows? Or perhaps you think of the ruthless business man turned hardened criminal, a modern day depiction in recent movies and media.You’d probably be surprised to know that you’ve met a sociopath already, at least one. Are they your classmate, colleague, friend, or even lover? The thing about sociopaths that so few realize is that they are chameleons, masters at blending in. Unless you know them intimately, you will have no idea what’s going on behind the charming façade.In the real world, sociopaths are far more likely to lie to family members, steal from workplaces, cheat on their partners, abuse drugs, and commit fraud, than they ever are to murder someone.Although not all actions by a sociopath are criminal, many are what society considers immoral, and you remain unaware of the sociopaths in your own life at your peril. In this book you will learn what a true sociopath is like, how to recognize them, and how to deal with them – especially if they cannot be avoided. I also discuss how to help yourself heal after you come out the other side.Is there a cure, or even any hope for sociopaths? The short answer is ‘we don’t know’, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and forewarned is forearmed. Don’t let yourself become the next to be manipulated, lied to, or even assaulted or have your life destroyed by the sociopath you know.Topics of Discussion ✓ What is Sociopathy? ✓ Sociopathic Personalities ✓ How to Recognize a Sociopath ✓ Surviving a Sociopath ✓ Clinical Sociopathy ✓ The Cause of Sociopathy ✓ Is there a Cure? ✓ BONUS! Find Inside… Download Your Copy Today! The contents of this book are easily worth over $20 but if you download it right now you'll get it for only $3.99 or FREE on Kindle Unlimited!---------Tags: Sociopath, ASPD

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity


Nadine Burke Harris - 2018
    Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego — a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault — who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.The news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime.  For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come​.

Administrations of Lunacy: A Story of Racism and Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum


Mab Segrest - 2020
    After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. Administrations of Lunacy tells the story of this iconic and infamous southern institution, a history that was all but erased from popular memory and within the psychiatric profession.Through riveting accounts of historical characters, Segrest reveals how modern psychiatric practice was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Deftly connecting this history to the modern era, Segrest then shows how a single asylum helped set the stage for the eugenics theories of the twentieth century and the persistent racial ideologies of our own times. She also traces the connections to today’s dissident psychiatric practices that offer sanity and create justice.A landmark of scholarship, Administrations of Lunacy restores a vital thread between past and present, revealing the tangled racial roots of psychiatry in America.

The Upstream Doctors (TED)


Rishi Manchanda - 2013
    But that picture is vastly incomplete. In this eye-opening book, physician Rishi Manchanda says that our health may depend even more on our social and environmental settings than it does on our most cutting-edge medical care. Manchanda argues that that the future of our health care depends on growing a new generation of health care practitioners. We need doctors who look upstream for the sources of our problems, rather than simply go for quick-hit symptomatic relief. These upstreamists, as he calls them, are doctors and nurses on the frontlines of medicine who see that health (like sickness) is more than a chemical equation that can be balanced with pills and procedures administered within clinic walls. They see that health begins in our everyday lives, in the places where we live, work, eat, and play. If our high-cost, sick-care system is to become a high-value, health care system, the upstreamists will show us the way. (Description taken from TED Library: http://www.ted.com/pages/tedbooks_lib...)

Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction


Maia Szalavitz - 2016
    But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th century ideas, addiction as a crime or as brain disease, and in equally outdated treatment.Challenging both the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and the notion of a simple "addictive personality," The New York Times Bestseller, Unbroken Brain, offers a radical and groundbreaking new perspective, arguing that addictions are learning disorders and shows how seeing the condition this way can untangle our current debates over treatment, prevention and policy. Like autistic traits, addictive behaviors fall on a spectrum -- and they can be a normal response to an extreme situation. By illustrating what addiction is, and is not, the book illustrates how timing, history, family, peers, culture and chemicals come together to create both illness and recovery- and why there is no "addictive personality" or single treatment that works for all.Combining Maia Szalavitz's personal story with a distillation of more than 25 years of science and research, Unbroken Brain provides a paradigm-shifting approach to thinking about addiction.Her writings on radical addiction therapies have been featured in The Washington Post, Vice Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, in addition to multiple other publications. She has been interviewed about her book on many radio shows including Fresh Air with Terry Gross and The Brian Lehrer show.

Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis


Kenneth Paul Rosenberg - 2019
    Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the '50s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults — 40 million Americans — experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the U.S. is the LA County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally ill people living on the streets of Los Angeles is LA County Hospital. There, Dr. Rosenberg begins his chronicle of what it means to be mentally ill in America today, integrating his own moving story of how the system failed his sister, Merle, who had schizophrenia. As he says, "I have to come to see that my family's tragedy is an American tragedy. My family's shame is America's great secret."

Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor


James J. O'Connell - 2015
    O'Connell’s collection of stories and essays, written during thirty years of caring for homeless persons in Boston, gently illuminates the humanity and raw courage of those who struggle to survive and find meaning and hope while living on the streets.