Malignant Sadness

Author: Lewis Wolpert
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571266711
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
'An excellent book, the most objective short account I know of all the various approaches to depression.' Anthony Storr Several years ago, Lewis Wolpert had a severe episode of depression. Despite a happy marriage and successful scientific career, he could think only of suicide. When he did recover, he became aware of the stigma attached to depression - and just how difficult it was to get reliable information. With characteristic candour and determination he set about writing this book, an acclaimed investigation into the causes and treatments of depression, which formed the basis for a BBC TV series. This paperback edition features a new introduction, in which Wolpert discusses the reaction to his book and BBC series, and recounts his own recurring struggle with depression.

This Close to Happy

Author: Daphne Merkin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374711917
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016 “Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light. Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls “the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.” The arc of Merkin’s affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” “The opposite of depression,” she writes with characteristic insight, “is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.” In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, “It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.”

The Noonday Demon

Author: Andrew Solomon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145161103X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations, around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. He takes readers on a journey into the most pervasive of family secrets and contributes to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition.

Understanding Depression

Author: Carmine Pariante
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199533075
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Depression is a major cause of morbidity and a significant public health problem. This book brings together world leaders in research on depression to discuss both classical and innovative ideas for understanding this devastating disorder. It includes cutting edge research from neurobiology, psychology, genetics, and evolutionary biology.

Cultural Pessimism

Author: Bennett Oliver Bennett
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474464343
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Cultural pessimism arises with the conviction that the culture of a nation, a civilisation or of humanity itself is in a process of irreversible decline. In an incisive and wide-ranging analysis, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World charts the growth of pessimism in the West during the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on studies from within a very broad range of fields, which include ecology, human rights, military history, international relations, criminology, history of science, cultural criticism and political economy, the author shows how cultural pessimism in the postmodern world can be related to the cumulative effect of four key narratives of decline:*Environmental decline*Moral decline*Intellectual decline*Political declineAfter a review of pessimism in other historical periods, each of these narratives is explored in depth. The book attempts to answer a number of questions: how are the narratives constituted and what are the conditions to which they refer? To what extent are those conditions historically unprecedented? To which cultures do the narratives relate? What values do they reflect? To what extent are the identified processes of decline seen as irreversible? Concluding that cultural pessimism is as much a matter of psychological and biological disposition as of intellectual judgement, Oliver Bennett's challenging book offers valuable new insights into how we view the prospects of the twenty-first century.Features:*Provides an authoritative account of how the postmodern world has been represented as one of decline. *Brings together different perspectives kept apart by professional and academic specialisation*Views culture in its broadest sense as 'a whole way of life'*Provides an historical overview of cultural pessimism, tracing its various manifestations from the modern period back to its existence in early religions*Examines the biological, psychological and sociolog

How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells

Author: Lewis Wolpert
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039329272X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
Acclaimed biologist Lewis Wolpert eloquently narrates the basics of human life through the lens of its smallest component: the cell. Everything about our existence— imagination and reproduction, birth and death—is governed by our cells. They are the basis of all life in the universe, from the tiniest of bacteria to the most complex of animals. Genes in developing embryos determine the makeup of individuals, and the rapid firing between nerve cells creates the spirit of who we are. When we age, our cells cannot repair the damage they have undergone; when we get ill, it is because cells are so damaged they stop working and die. In the tradition of Lewis Thomas’s science classic The Lives of a Cell, Wolpert, an internationally acclaimed embryologist, draws on the recent discoveries of genetics to demonstrate how human life derives from a single cell and then grows into a body: an incredibly complex society made up of billions of cells. Wolpert sensitively examines the science behind often controversial research topics that are much discussed by rarely understood—stem cell research, cloning, DNA, and mutating cancer cells—all the while illuminating how the intricacies of cellular behavior bear directly on human behavior. Wolpert isn’t afraid to tackle the tough questions, including how and why single cells evolved into complex organisms and, first and foremost, what gave rise to the original cell, the origin of all life. Lively and passionate, How We Live and Why We Die is both an accessible guide to understanding the human body and a deeply reverent meditation on life itself.

Prozac Backlash

Author: Joseph Glenmullen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743200624
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
In a controversial look at the potent drugs millions of Americans consume each day--for everything from anxiety to sexual addiction--Dr. Glenmullen presents authoritative information on why they are risky and provides advice on choosing safer alternative treatments.

And Now Let Me Sleep

Author: P. Kesavan Balakrishnan
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
ISBN: 9788126006816
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
The Work On This Book Is Based Upon Vyasa Bharatha,The Author Has Recreated The Characters And Incidents Independently. The Author Created Of His Own A Parallel Concept Revolving Around Draupadi And In Those Imaginary Threads He Fastened The Petal Of KarnaýS Story. The Soliloquies Of Draupadi Are Innovated Imparting To It A New Philosophical Dimension And Giving A Tragic Depth In This Work.

Ordinarily Well

Author: Peter D. Kramer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374708967
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell? In Ordinarily Well, the celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients’ dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light. Kramer homes in on the moment of clinical decision making: Prescribe or not? What evidence should doctors bring to bear? Using the wide range of reference that readers have come to expect in his books, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks the “inside baseball” of psychiatry—statistics—and shows how findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions. Kramer never loses sight of patients. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications’ influence on his patients’ symptoms, behavior, careers, families, and quality of life. He updates his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful, and welcome, tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal—becoming ordinarily well.

The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

Author: Michelle Lovric
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620400154
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 688

Book Description
It's rural Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Pre-Raphaelites, when Europe burns with a passion for long, flowing locks. So when seven sisters, born into fatherless poverty, grow up with hair cascading down their backs, to their ankles, and beyond, men are not slow to recognize their potential. Soon, they're a singing and dancing septet: Irish jigs kicked out in dusty church halls. But it is not their singing or their dancing that fills the seats: it is the torrents of hair they let loose at the end of each show. In an Ireland still hungry and melancholy with the Great Famine, the Swiney hair is a rich offering. And their hair will take dark-hearted Darcy, bickering twins Berenice and Enda, plain Pertilly, gentle Oona, wild Ida, and fearful, flame-haired Manticory-the writer of their on- and off-stage adventures-out of poverty, through the dance halls of Ireland, to the salons of Dublin and the palazzi of Venice. It will bring them suitors and obsessive admirers, it will bring some of them love and each of them loss. For their past trails behind the sisters like the tresses on their heads and their fame and fortune will come at a terrible price. Rich in period detail, peopled by a bewitching cast of characters, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is a tale of exploitation and celebrity, illegitimacy and sibling rivalry, love triangles and financial skullduggery, of death and devilry. And a very great deal of hair.