A valuable assessment for clinicians and potential patients.
Frances weighs in with a no-holds-barred critique of the newly revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
As the DSM IV Task Force leader, the author does not duck responsibility for the problematic nature of the manual, which he describes as a “cultural icon” and “perennial best seller.” Not anticipating the diagnostic creep, “we failed to predict or prevent three new false epidemics of mental disorder in children—Autism, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Childhood Bipolar Disorder.” In the author's view, too often clinicians adopt labels from the manual to cover up their own sloppy and even faddish diagnoses. He predicts that the situation will worsen with the new edition. Once considered a rare disease, “CBD [childhood bipolar disorder] has become the most inflated bubble in all psychiatric diagnosis.” Frances anticipates that the DSM V’s inclusion of Asperger's in the autism spectrum will cause problems, possibly leading to a reduction of special school programs that help students with Asperger’s at one end of the spectrum, and disability benefits for the extremely disabled at the other. While accepting his own and fellow psychiatrists’ failure to predict the problem of label creep, the author ascribes most responsibility to pharmaceutical companies, which have “hijacked the medical profession” and created “a feeding frenzy of over-diagnosis, over-testing, and over-treatment.” He attributes the current obesity epidemic to side effects of modern antipsychotics, and he charges drug companies with complicity in promiscuously pushing antipsychotics on patients with “garden-variety” anxiety or shyness and broadening the definition of childhood bipolar disease to encompass temper tantrums and moodiness. In a partial effort of exculpation and mea culpa, Frances explains that his team began work in the “pre-Prozac days of 1987.”
A valuable assessment for clinicians and potential patients.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0062229250
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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