Book Review: Also Human: The Inner Lives of Doctors
It’s hard to imagine having someone’s life in your hands. It’s also hard to imagine what could possibly prepare a person for the emotional cost of such as endeavor as…
Policy and Advocacy
Book Review: Ethics Challenges in Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology
I used to work at a community mental health center. A client could be there totally on his or her own (which was the exception) or could have been referred…
Don’t Tell Me to Shut Up: The “Et Tu, Brute” Stigma of Mental Illness
After sharing my eccentric journey to recovery in a new book, I’ve been accused of being anti-psychiatry. I’m not anti-psychiatry. I’m only anti-psychiatry if it means questioning the long-term efficacy…
Implicit Bias Leads to Explicit Danger
There has been considerable and well-deserved publicity regarding cases where implicit or explicit police bias has led to unwarranted arrests and shooting of unarmed black individuals. The Starbucks case illustrates…
Book Review: American Snake Pit
As a society, we often forget those who are in the most dire need. We tend to wave off any thoughts of the developmentally disabled or those left behind due…
Book Review: Saving Talk Therapy
“Nowadays, people don’t ‘go into therapy’…they ‘receive mental health interventions,’” writes Enrico Gnaulati in a cynical introduction to his new book Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted…
Book Review: Insane Consequences
I have read Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill a couple of times and am still contemplating it. It also inspired me to research further…
Marriage and Mania: Disparate Depictions of Bipolar Disorder in Mainstream Romance Novels
When characters with mental illness appear in popular fiction, it is typically because the work itself focuses on the mental illness. However, there is a small contingent of fictional projects…
Book Review: The Diagnostic System
While it’s true that many illnesses are foreign to the average person, many of the core symptoms of mental illness are familiar to virtually everyone. “Not only does the public…
Book Review: Welcome to Your World
Students of psychological research have become familiar with a wide array of factors that play a role in how our lives unfold, including our personalities, upbringing, talents, motivation, social connections,…
I’ve Been Seeing a Therapist for Years, So Why Am I Not Getting Better?
The answer: We need to address what’s happening inside the office as well as stigma. During the creation of the documentary Going Sane I interviewed Cindy Bulik. She is perhaps…
Narcissistic Abuse Affects Over 158 Million People in the U.S.
World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day is June 1, and everyone, unless you’re living under a rock, has heard the word narcissist. In fact, the word is tossed around so liberally…
Book Review: Bad Feminist: Essays
The title of Roxane Gay’s New York Times bestseller is Bad Feminist. But you don’t have to be any kind of feminist, or even have any interest in feminism, to…
Book Review: The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream
Courtney E. Martin opens The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream with the fact that “For the first time in history, nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe that…
Book Review: The Power Paradox
Want to understand power? Forget Machiavelli! For too long, argues Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, we have accepted unquestioningly the version of…