Despite a few unpersuasive arguments, this is a formidable entry in the field of books about the mental health crisis.
The former director of the National Institute of Mental Health diagnoses and prescribes cures for a mental health care system that’s “a disaster on many fronts.”
In his first book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Insel explains an apparent paradox of mental health care: “Current treatments work,” but too few people get their benefits, and outcomes for the U.S. as a whole remain “dire.” Arguing that the crisis exists “because we fail to deliver on what we know, or we fail to use what works,” the author often slights evidence suggesting that the poor results persist because some common treatments do not work or are overused rather than underused. He ignores, for example, well-regarded studies that have found that depression and ADHD are overdiagnosed and overtreated, and he oversells some treatments he supports. For readers who can live with Insel’s overly bullish view of certain remedies, however, this book offers a wealth of fresh, clear, and mercifully jargon-free facts and insights into America’s mental health care problems and possible solutions. The author links the crisis to the Reagan administration’s slashing of federal spending on community health and its scaling back of support for the “deinstitutionalization” promoted by John F. Kennedy and others. He also describes the potential benefits of “supported education and employment” programs and of controversial technology like digital phenotyping. In the strongest chapters, Insel shows how current U.S. policies have ravaged the poor, the homeless, and the incarcerated; the U.S. has so few hospital beds for the mentally ill that some police do “mercy bookings,” which let people get care in jail that hospitals can’t provide: “The Los Angeles County Jail and Chicago’s Cook County Jail are now the largest mental health institutions in the nation.” Insel makes clear that such mental health conditions involve moral and civil rights issues, adding important dimensions often neglected in similar books.
Despite a few unpersuasive arguments, this is a formidable entry in the field of books about the mental health crisis.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29804-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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