Review by Choice Review
What is happiness? Psychiatrist Ghaemi (Tufts Medical Center; A First-Rate Madness, CH, Nov'11, 49-1764; The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model, CH, Jul'10, 47-6284) argues that people may understand and achieve happiness by experiencing its counterpart--sadness. It is difficult to examine sadness, given the current state of health care, as clinicians try to eliminate depression and sadness. By embracing sadness as a pathway to happiness, Ghaemi asserts that people can remove the social stigma related to depression since it would be defined as part of a "normal" emotional experience. According to the author, people can find insight into happiness by examining sadness through profiles and guidelines composed by psychiatrists such as Viktor Frankl and Karl Jaspers. The guidelines can sometimes include medical and pharmaceutical intervention. His argument is heavily based on his previous published and clinical work in psychiatry, and partly based on philosophical principles of medicine. Citations are not provided in the text, but a list of references by page is available at the end of the book. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners; informed general audiences. M. L. Charleroy University of Minnesota
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The key to happiness might be sadness-or maybe we need to expand our definition of "happiness" to include more introspectively low states, argues Tufts University psychiatry professor Ghaemi (A First-Rate Madness) in this scientific and philosophical treatise on depression. The author blames our culture of widespread discontent on two phenomena: the death of God and postmodernism. The former has made us to feel purposeless, while the latter has undermined psychiatric nosology by blurring the line between physical and existential symptoms. These cultural malaises have combined with overly prescriptive psychiatric practices to disastrous effect. Ghaemi spends the first part of the book outlining the intricacies of this large-scale problem before going on to profile several thinkers, or "guides" (including Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl), whose wisdom he believes can lead individuals toward a clearer understanding of themselves and their experiences of happiness and sadness. Ghaemi acknowledges that drugs do work for some people, and though his ideas about the necessity of pain and sitting through suffering are nothing new, his theory that understanding happiness requires accepting its impossibility-or at least embracing our time in the trenches-presents our darker moods in a more optimistic light. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ghaemi (director, Mood Disorders Program, Tufts Univ. Sch. of Medicine; A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness) emphasizes the relationship between therapist and patient. His vigorous critique of psychoanalysis, prescription drugs ("Pharmageddon"), and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) stands out among recent books on the decline of psychiatry, a profession that now occupies "the same place scientifically as medicine did at the end of the nineteenth century." Ghaemi puts to good use his knowledge of the pioneers of medical history, e.g., Hippocrates, Galen, Philippe Pinel, and William Osler. His appreciation of 20th-century therapists Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, and Elvin Semrad, philosopher Karl Jaspers, and his own mentors, psychiatrist Leston Havens and historian Paul Roazen, is heartfelt as well as intellectually rich. In his penultimate chapter, "The Banality of Mental Health," Ghaemi examines norm, normal, and ideal. Normal is often mediocre, while among the outstanding and creative are many who suffer from mania and depression. "Who can say which is better?" Verdict An informed, challenging, and readable approach to a vital subject. Despair is in the title, but readers will rejoice in the reading.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
