Book picks similar to
Seduction of Madness by Edward M. Podvoll
non-fiction
psychology
10k-plus-ratings-no
30-plus-ratings-no
The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu
Witter Bynner - 1980
His gentle warning on the futility of egoistic struggle have made The Way of Life the basis for one of the world's great religions, Taoism, and on of the most important books that was ever written. "The 81 saying in this volume shine like gems cut clear and beautiful in every facet.. this translation will stand as the perfect rendering of a classic work." ~ John Haynes Holmes
Drugs, Behavior and Modern Society
Charles F. Levinthal - 1995
Drugs, Behavior, and Modern Society, 6/e, examines the impact of drug-taking behavior on our society and our daily lives. The use and abuse of a wide range of licit and illicit drugs are discussed from historical, biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. The use of Drugs in our lives and drug-taking behavior, legally restricted drugs in our society, legal drugs in our society, medicinal drugs, treatment, prevention, and education. Forstudents, or people working with drug related topics in the fields of psychology and health.
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory
Julia Shaw - 2016
We rely on them every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is they are far from being the accurate record of the past we like to think they are. True, we can all admit to having suffered occasional memory lapses, such as entering a room and immediately forgetting why, or suddenly being unable to recall the name of someone we've met dozens of times. But what if our minds have the potential for more profound errors, that enable the manipulation or even outright fabrication of our memories?In The Memory Illusion, forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr Julia Shaw uses the latest research to show the astonishing variety of ways in which our brains can indeed be led astray. She shows why we can sometimes misappropriate other people's memories, subsequently believing them to be our own. She explains how police officers can imprison an innocent man for life on the basis of many denials and just one confession. She demonstrates the way radically false memories can be deliberately implanted, leading people to believe they had tea with Prince Charles, or committed crimes that never happened. And she reveals how, in spite of all this, we can improve our memory through simple awareness of its fallibility. Fascinating and unnerving in equal measure, The Memory Illusion offers a unique insight into the human brain, challenging you to question how much you can ever truly know about yourself.
The Other Side of the Couch: A Psychiatrist Solves His Most Unusual Cases
Gary Small - 2011
Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind A psychiatrist’s stories of his most bizarre cases, The Other Side of the Couch (originally published in hardcover as The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head) by Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan—co-authors of The Memory Bible—offers a fascinating and highly entertaining look into the peculiarities of the human mind. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and the other bestselling works of Oliver Sacks, The Other Side of the Couch surprises, enthralls, and illuminates as it focuses on medical mysteries that would stump and amaze the brilliant brains on House, M.D.
Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder
Donald W. Black - 1999
They shirk everyday responsibilities, abuse drugs and alcohol, take up criminal careers, and lash out at family members. In the worst cases, they commit rape, murder, and other acts of extreme violence as though they lack a conscience. What makes these men--men we all know, whether as faces in the news or as people close to us--behave the way they do?Bad Boys, Bad Men examines antisocial personality disorder or ASP, the mysterious mental condition that underlies this lifelong penchant for bad behavior. Psychiatrist and researcher Donald W. Black, MD, draws on case studies, scientific data, and current events to explore antisocial behavior and to chart the history, nature, and treatment of a misunderstood disorder that affects up to seven million Americans. Citing new evidence from genetics and neuroscience, Black argues that this condition is tied to biological causes and that some people are simply born bad. Bad Boys, Bad Men introduces us to people like Ernie, the quintessential juvenile delinquent who had an incestuous relationship with his mother and descended into crime and alcoholism; and John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer whose lifelong pattern of misbehavior escalated to the rape and murder of more than 30 young men and boys. These compelling cases read like medical detective stories as Black tries to separate the lies these men tell from the facts of their lives. Bad Boys, Bad Men not only describes the warning signs that predict which troubled children are more likely to become dangerous adults, but also details progress toward treatment for ASP. This volume will be an essential resource for psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists, victims of crime, families of individuals afflicted with ASP, and anyone else interested in understanding antisocial behavior.
Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body
Jo Marchant - 2016
Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease and even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers.In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication. We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone.Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, lays out its limitations and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives. With clarity and compassion, Cure points the way towards a system of medicine that treats us not simply as bodies but as human beings.
The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Siri Hustvedt - 2009
Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. The Shaking Woman tracks Hustvedt’s search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, she finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self?During her investigations, Hustvedt joins a discussion group in which neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and brain scientists trade ideas to develop a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. She volunteers as a writing teacher for psychiatric in-patients at the Payne Whitney clinic in New York City and unearths precedents in medical history that illuminate the origins of and shifts in our theories about the mind-body problem. In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt synthesizes her experience and research into a compelling mystery: Who is the shaking woman? In the end, the story she tells becomes, in the words of George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind, “a brilliant illumination for us all.”
Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good?
Richard P. Bentall - 2009
It lay in biological solutions, focusing on mental illness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved through drugs. We entered the Prozac Age and believed we had moved far beyond the time of frontal lobotomies to an age of good and successful mental healthcare. Biological psychiatry had triumphed.Except maybe it hadn't. Starting with surprising evidence from the World Health Organization that suggests that people recover better from mental illness in a developing country than in the first world, Doctoring the Mind asks the question: how good are our mental healthcare services, really? Richard P. Bentall picks apart the science that underlies our current psychiatric practice. He puts the patient back at the heart of treatment for mental illness, making the case that a good relationship between patients and their doctors is the most important indicator of whether someone will recover.Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that focuses as much on patients as individuals as on the brain itself, this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of madness in the twenty-first century.
Myth and Religion: A Thorn in the Flesh
Alan W. Watts - 1996
He then takes a revealing look at the mystical origins of Christianity in Jesus - His Religion, Or the Religion About Him? and explores how Christianity has diverged historically from those teachings in a brilliant and well researched critique of the Church. In Democracy in the Kingdom of Heaven Watts then carries his inquiry one step further, and asks if indeed a monarchical religion still makes sense in a democratic society. Watts takes a fascinating look at the ultimately anthropomorphic quality of man's view of his god in Images of Man. Here he is only half kidding when he says that "In the beginning there was Man, and he created God in his image," pointing to the highly subjective nature of our inquiry into the highest orders of reality. In the final chapter, Religion and Sexuality, Watts again looks at organized religion, but with more than a touch of humor as he suggests that churches today are sexual regulation societies, and precious little else. To make this point Watts asks, "How else can you get thrown out?" He then goes on to discuss the social implications of the Church's investment in moral issues, and demonstrates that this may in fact be a ploy to cover up for the lack of any substantial religious teaching in organized religion today.
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
Scott Stossel - 2014
Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: Simple ways to keep the little things from taking over your life
Richard Carlson - 2017
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life
Jerome Bruner - 2002
Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work?In Making Stories, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner examines this pervasive human habit and suggests new and deeper ways to think about how we use stories to make sense of lives and the great moral and psychological problems that animate them. Looking at legal cases and autobiography as well as literature, Bruner warns us not to be seduced by overly tidy stories and shows how doubt and double meaning can lie beneath the most seemingly simple case.
Understanding ADHD: The Definitive Guide to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Christopher Green - 1994
Winston Churchill had it.Is your child also suffering from A.D.H.D.?Though medical science has known about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder for almost one hundred years, for most of us A.D.H.D. remains a new and baffling condition. Now, at last, here is a clear and comprehensive guide to this common disorder.As renowned pediatrician Dr. Christopher Green explains, A.D.H.D. is actually a cluster of behaviors--including inattentiveness, impulsiveness, and overactivity--that causes children (mostly boys) to underachieve at school and behave poorly at home despite high intelligence and quality parenting. Understanding A.D.H.D. covers every aspect of the disorder, from diagnosis to treatment. Inside you'll discover ¸ How to tell if a child has A.D.H.D. ¸ Practical solutions to common behavior problems at home and school ¸ When and how to medicate your child ¸ The best sports for someone with A.D.H.D. ¸ Measures to take for building self-esteem And much more!Informative, reassuring, and up-to-date, Understanding A.D.H.D. is an invaluable resource for parents, teachers, and health professionals.
Teach Yourself Better Handwriting New Edition (TYHR)
Rosemary Sassoon - 1993
Teach Yourself Better Handwriting includes self-diagnosis tests to identify problems, before-and-after examples illustrating common faults, and a detailed section on holding the pen. It also offers advice to those with special circumstances that may affect their handwriting, such as being left-handed or having a medical condition.