Book reviews by Linda Barrett:
Everyone has wondered why so many famous artists and writers like painter Vincent Van Gogh and poet George Gordon, Lord Byron suffered with their bi-polar illnesses. Kay Redfield Jamison, author of “An Unquiet Mind” tries to find the answer with her book, Touched With Fire, published by Free Press (under publishers Simon and Schuster) in 1993. Jamison explores the inner demons within these creative souls through scientific findings, family histories, and how medical science tries to answer the artist’s temperment dilemma
This book is in our New Directions library!
– LB, June 2013
Here’s a great book for those who want to understand why our mental health care system is so chaotic:
“Out of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis – A call for reform” by Harvard psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson and medical journalist Jonathan A. Leonard discuss the history, the rise and the fall of the American mental health care system.
This compelling book has a wonderful style written in layman’s terms to describe how it all fell short of providing adequate service for the mentally ill and their families.
The book also gives an accurate analysis of how the most complex of the organs in the human body works and how many psychotropic drugs work to counterbalance psychosis and other mental disorders.
“Out of its mind” gives its own solutions to solve the problems we face with the medical insurance companies, the drug companies, and our governement’s care of its mentally ill citizens.
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Our newest contribution to the New Directions Library is called “When Someone You Love Is Depressed: How to Help Your Loved One Without Losing Yourself” written in 1996 and published by The Free Press, offers helpful and compassionate insight in handling all forms of Depression and Bipolar illnesses. The authors, Laura Epstein Rosen, Ph.D of New York’s Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and supervisor of Family Therapy Special Needs Clinic, and Xavier Francisco Amador, Ph.D, Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons as well as Director of Diagnosis and Evaluation Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute, use case studies and professional insight illustrating ways for family members and friends to cope during their loved one’s depression.
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The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide, Second Edition: What You and Your Family Need to Know [Paperback] byDavid J. Miklowitz PhD