Intensely detailed case studies of people’s lives to make points about mental health and how we must see it in context. There’s fascinating stuff i3.5
Intensely detailed case studies of people’s lives to make points about mental health and how we must see it in context. There’s fascinating stuff in here, but it has to be weeded out–I can’t imagine anyone enjoying this unless they enjoy academic or psychological case studies.
Here are some of the issues examined that I found interesting:
1) How the medical field and diagnosis can generalize to the point where one can learn unhealthy behaviors from others in treatment centers, much like prisoners can learn how to become better criminals from their environment. 2) How understanding individual nuance is much more therapeutic than diagnosis. 3) How racial prejudices are ingrained in the health field to the extent that anyone outside it will get compromised care. 4) How cultural roles for females result in dismissal of warning signs for care. 5) How as recent as midcentury, medication was considered a road block to healing depression, and then when proof changed the public’s mind, it outbalanced talk therapy to create cascading medications, a term used to describe the pile of meds one takes in reaction to side effects of others.
Despite not loving this, I’m keeping my copy. I’ll never read it again as a whole, but find value in revisiting the parts....more
4.5 This book is a perfect length for the content - just enough to feel sated - and it’s organized into sections of thought, from:
1) how mushroom trip4.5 This book is a perfect length for the content - just enough to feel sated - and it’s organized into sections of thought, from:
1) how mushroom trips can rewire the neural pathways in your brain to alleviate depression, anxiety and addiction, and inspire creativity and new ways to solve problems; to:
2) a section on the environment and how fungi could save our planet by both decomposing toxic waste, and composing organic materials to replace leather and wood, in addition to possibly saving our bees; to
3) a chapter on a species of fungi that bursts open the skull of an ant and uses its body to perform acts that benefit the fungus, but that it can’t perform in its original form (straight up science feels like science fiction here).
It is well written and wonderfully entertaining. Oh, and did I say? It blew my mind....more
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