A heartfelt memoir and an urgent demand for higher standards of juvenile mental health care.
A once-institutionalized psychiatric patient exposes a flawed, corrupt system.
Now in his early 50s, Lyon, a backpacking guide and instructor, was an ordinary kid, torn between divorced parents who lived in different states and didn’t know what to do with him. “My life wasn’t perfect. I still missed California,” he writes. “But settling in Dallas was better than being bounced from house to house like an unwanted package.” His parents’ solution was to move the understandably disaffected kid into a psychiatric facility for a few weeks, only to watch as a few weeks turned into a year. As the author notes, the standard mode of treatment was to force the teenager to sit in a chair day in and day out, the better to ponder the error of his youthful ways. Lyon serves up sharp portraits of his wardens, from the bureaucratic head who placed him in the worst unit in the place to the supposed therapist who imposed one meaningless punishment after another. Placed in a halfway house, he confronted what passed for the real world—and eventually won a legal judgment for psychiatric malpractice, a short-lived victory that preceded a series of spirit-killing defeats. “I hated being the poster boy for psychiatry gone wrong,” he writes; still, he did much to expose that malfeasance then, just as he does in these well-considered pages. One feels for Lyon as he describes coping with inconceivably terrible loss. Years later, he learned the true, and truly indefensible, reason for his having been confined in the first place. The author, who went on to become an outdoor guide, is also gracious about his difficult life, writing, meaningfully, “today is a very different place than I ever could have imagined.”
A heartfelt memoir and an urgent demand for higher standards of juvenile mental health care.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780593657133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Open Field
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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