Further Reading
The books listed below may be useful for those using either HDRM or AMAC approaches to eating disorders.
Very few books avoid fattist examples and analogies, whether they directly pertain to eating disorders or to psychoeducational efforts to improve quality of life more generally.
The lists found below are not exhaustive or even particularly representative of the best of what might be available to support either your recovery or harm reduction efforts, but it is a place to start.
EDI Publications •
EDI Publications •
Recover from Eating Disorders
Homeodynamic Recovery Method
by Gwyneth Olwyn
Recover from Eating Disorders: the Homeodynamic Recovery Method has been developed for adults with eating disorders to provide much needed information on how to achieve remission. Certainly, there are no guarantees when it comes to your journey through recovery, but it can be much less intimidating if you are given a compass, a map and some sense of what markers you should look for as you navigate recovery— and that is what this guide sets out to do. The HDRM is an analysis and synthesis of scientific research that demonstrates how remission is achieved for adults with eating disorders.
Journal
by Gwyneth Olwyn
Recovery Experiences •
Recovery Experiences •
I, Dragonfly: A Memoir of Recovery and Flight
This groundbreaking memoir unveils the light and shadows of anorexia recovery—from what it requires to what it can ultimately deliver.
At thirty-three years old, Kerrie was managing a freelance career, her three young children, and a closeted battle with anorexia that had plagued the past ten years of her life. But once the mounting misery finally becomes too much, she embarks on a treacherous two-year journey to remission from this lethal and pervasive neurobiological condition.
Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia
There will be few "personal journey" books that I would ever care to recommend to those looking for guidance on recovery from any kind of harmful eating behaviours, but this book is one worthy exception. Because the author is the mother of the daughter attempting to recover from anorexia nervosa, and because she is also an accomplished investigative writer, Harriet Brown offers up a clinically-valid process that resulted in a successful recovery for her daughter, and her family. Acutely aware of how triggering many memoirs can be, Brown is cautious of what information she has chosen to include regarding the worst aspects of her daughter's illness.
Brain Retraining Support •
Brain Retraining Support •
The Highly Sensitive Person
The value of this book, as it pertains to all those struggling with eating disorders, is understanding how much societal framing of our natural predispositions can complicate our ability to be at peace with our natural selves. Many patients with restrictive eating behaviours also struggle with sensory overload common to sensitive people and Aron has very useful advice and techniques to apply to help live in cultures that revere extroverted and low-sensitivity types.
How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers
by Toni Bernhard and Sylvia Boorstein (foreword)
Another book that I regularly recommend to those trudging through the physical challenge that is recovery from an eating disorder. Don't be at all leery of the "Buddhist-inspired" element (if you happen to follow a different faith or not faith at all). It could just as easily have been titled "A Dialectic-Inspired..." in that the core of the message is about being able to hold both realities at once: being sick and hopeful for health all at once. An excellent book if you are struggling with "wanting recovery to be over, so I can get back to my life."
The Migraine Brain: Your Breakthrough Fewer Headaches, Better Health
by Carolyn Bernstein M.D. and Elaine McArdle
Sadly many folk with eating disorders also struggle with migraines. Big warning on this book -- when the good doctor veers into the nutrition side, well, suffice to say doctors don't get a whole lot of education and training on nutrition so just be very careful that you keep your eating disorder-thoughts well-barricaded away from those parts of the book. That said, she does not suggest diet remediation has any value for the treatment of migraines across the board. Some individuals find some things (most commonly red wine) will trigger a migraine, but there are as many who can tolerate chocolate and cheese as there are those for whom it will trigger a migraine. And when it comes to migraines, this is *the* definitive book on the topic in my opinion.
The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments
by William Bridges
William Bridges has made a career out of educating and training others on how to navigate transitions in life, and he did this mostly within the corporate world. This book reflects the point at which he had to face practicing what he had been preaching all those years. It is personal journey through transition that I believe will help many navigate the significant transition that is the path from active eating disorder to remission.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Alongside The Highly Sensitive Person, Quiet is a good book for those who believe they might have introverted tendencies and want to figure out how to navigate within a world that is skewed towards extroversion as the more appealing trait to have for "getting ahead". While I do not know definitively whether there are a higher number of introverts in the eating disorder population relative to the population at large, even if it matches the population at large, that still nets out at at least 20% of the community who will find this book really helps them.
A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
Cordelia Fine is such a brilliant and humorous writer that it would be easy to overlook that this is a very well-turned out and definitive meta-analysis on all things self-delusional (and healthy) about our brains. When the mildly-depressed are the ones who have an objective take on things, you begin to grasp that mental illness is not illness but perhaps altered brain function that serves an overall purpose for group survival.
The Face of Emotion: How Botox Affects Our Moods and Relationships
by Eric Finzi
This book is a lot more than just how Botox affects moods. It is a really useful and scientific investigation on how our facial muscles and emotions have two-way communication. And that means that changing our facial expression will change our mood as much as our mood can change our facial expressions. For those who struggle with co-morbid and treatment resistant depression, Botox has some fascinating initial trial data to support its ability to alleviate depressive symptoms where all other treatments have failed.
Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You
by Jerome Groopman, M.D. and Pamela Hartzband, M.D.
Doctors Groopman and Hartzband explain that each of us has a “medical mind,” a highly individual approach to weighing the risks and benefits of treatments. Are you a minimalist or a maximalist, a believer or a doubter, do you look for natural healing or the latest technology? The authors weave vivid narratives of real patients with insights from recent research to demonstrate the power of the medical mind. After reading this groundbreaking book, you will know how to arrive at choices that serve you best.
One of the best books I've come across for helping you ascertain what care you will seek out and the kind of professional help you will and will not be willing to work with before you step foot inside a doctor's office. I reference this book often across the site in numerous articles as the philosophy of “watchful waiting” encourage on EDI is an approach that may or may not align with your medical mind.
Women Who Worry Too Much: How to Stop Worry and Anxiety from Ruining Relationships, Work, and Fun
by Holly Hazlett-Stevens Ph.D. and Michelle G. Craske Ph.D.
A very quick and approachable read. Hazlett-Stevens provides excellent tools and techniques to address anxiety levels that impede quality of life. As the restriction eating disorder spectrum has significant overlap with various anxiety disorders, this books is a really useful tool in conjunction with cognitive behavioural therapy to learn to apply non-restrictive eating behaviours while being able to handle the accompanying increase in anxiety that approaching and eating food will generate.
And no, worry and anxiety are not women-only states.
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist who has dedicated his professional career to integrating meditative practices within medical environments, in particular in areas where there has been poor medical outcomes for patients. He has undertaken and published numerous clinical trials clearly indicating the evidence-based outcomes of mindfulness practice are measurably beneficial to patients. He has written several books all of which I am sure are good, this however happens to be the one I have read and would recommend. The one proviso to this book is that there is nutritional advice within the later chapters that are not at all applicable to those on the eating disorder spectrum. As Kabat-Zinn works with individuals with pre-existing disease states that are degenerative and usually progressive, his diet advice will likely provide relief for patients only within those contexts. As long as you are prepared to ignore the nutritional advice, the practice of mindfulness as explained in this book is worth a read.
Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin– How to Recognize and Set Healthy Boundaries
Many of those who have walked into their adult lives with eating disorders that remain active but perhaps managed often appear to benefit from addressing all the ways in which restriction is used to avoid addressing numerous boundary infractions that occur both in their personal and professional lives. This is a great book for exploring whether your sense of boundaries between yourself and others is life-enhancing or life-limiting for you. One word of warning: as is common these days, many in the counselling field feel qualified to make pronouncements on eating, nutrition and Anne Katherine is no exception. Please just ignore the misdguided information on emotional eating and food addiction in this book.
The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-by-Step Program
This book comes highly recommended both by colleagues as well as some members on this site in helping them progress with their recovery from restrictive eating behaviours. If cognitive behavioural therapy with a counsellor is not possible for you, then this book is a very good option. CBT has a large body of research to support its use in tackling the thoughts and actions that are practiced and reinforced around the misidentification of food as a threat (the underpinning of an eating disorder. The foundation of CBT is that the patient uncover false beliefs that lead to unwanted behaviours (in the case food restriction). The hole in this treatment modality is who defines “false beliefs”? Don’t despair if CBT is not for you or did not work for you as there are other treatment modalities to consider such as exposure and response prevention and motivational interviewing that are equally effective.
DBT Skills Training Manual
From Marsha M. Linehan--the developer of dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT)--this comprehensive resource provides vital tools for implementing DBT skills training. The reproducible teaching notes, handouts, and worksheets used for over two decades by hundreds of thousands of practitioners have been significantly revised and expanded to reflect important research and clinical advances. The book gives complete instructions for orienting clients to DBT, plus teaching notes for the full range of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance skills. Handouts and worksheets are not included in the book; purchasers get access to a Web page where they can download and print all the handouts and worksheets discussed, as well as the teaching notes. DBT is particularly useful for patients who would like to modulate their emotional responses, or have not found cognitive behavioural therapy particularly helpful, or have struggled with relapses and nothing seems to be working.
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
I am forever sending visitors to this site over to Dr. Neff's site and her book is worthwhile picking up as well. Again, I have to warn everyone that Dr. Neff is not a nutritionist and so when she heads into that territory, keep your eating disorder well in check. She is no exception to many professionals I am referencing in this section who offer up the usual common nonsense on nutrition and fatness. However, when she writes within her area of expertise (self-compassion) the information, trial data and techniques she offers for building self-compassion into your life are truly invaluable to those undertaking the recovery process from an eating disorder.
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Third Edition
Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology, addresses how prolonged stress causes or exacerbates many physiological and neurological afflictions. A great read, this book is pertinent to all those who are dealing with eating disorders because the complex interplay of environmental long-term and unresolved stressors (strained relationships, unpleasant jobs, poverty...) encourage the production of hormones that are optimized for helping the body navigate stress that resolves (fleeing a predator as one example). While Sapolsky does not address the novel construct that our circadian rhythms and eating change in response to the fat organ needing to enlarge to produce more hormones that help modulate how stress hormones act on the body long-term, it does speak to the biological impacts of the kinds of modern stressors we all tend to have far more than a lion popping out from the parking lot and taking a bite out of our leg.
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
I picked up this book on the basis of her TEDTalk and I was not disappointed. As so many working through recovery from an eating disorder struggle mightily with getting the recovery process "right" and have low tolerance for errors or mistakes of any kind, this book is a brilliant exposition on why being wrong is so great.
Don't Let Emotions Ruin Your Life: How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Can Put You in Control
Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is a treatment approach that helps those with eating disorders who also find that their emotions seem out-sized and the intensity is unbearable. In fact, restrictive eating behaviours may have been inadvertently reinforced for you precisely because they knock down emotional intensity and so as you begin to refeed and rest, you might find the surge of emotional content in your mind is raw and extremely painful. This is a hands-on workbook to help you develop DBT techniques. DBT as a treatment approach requires psychotherapeutic guidance and group support, but this workbook will certainly support that process.
The Gaslight Effect: How to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life
A useful and approachable book looking at how to identify and address boundaries with others where their needs and view always take precedence over yours. Dr. Stern coined the term "gaslight effect" in reference to the 1944 movie "Gaslight" where Ingrid Bergman's character marries a man interested in getting his hands on the jewels that were bequeathed to her by her murdered aunt. His plan is to make her think she is losing her mind so that she can be committed to an asylum. He denies the gaslights flicker when she clearly sees they do. She is saved by a constable interested in the cold case of her aunt's murder. The book is filled with practical lists for identifying whether you are dealing with a gaslight effect in your own life and what you can do to stop dancing the gaslight tango.
Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety
by Kelly G. Wilson, Troy DuFrene
Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong will help you climb inside anxiety, sit in that place, and see what it would be like to have anxiety and still make room in your life to breathe and rest and live — really and truly live — in a way that matters to you.
As eating disorders are anxiety disorders at heart, this book has solid applicability for those working on the brain retraining foundation that assures a solid and resilient remission from an eating disorder.
Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
While not many with eating disorders experience psychosis (it can happen during severe starvation however), I recommend this book for what it can teach us more broadly on the paradigm of medicalized mental illness and its failure to provide promised outcomes and improvements for patients. This is one of my personal favourites in fact as it cracks open the possibility that all things mental illness need a “rebrand.”
The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life
by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
The Art of Possibility combines Benjamin Zander's experience as conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and his talent as a teacher and communicator with psychotherapist Rosamund Stone Zander's genius for designing innovative paradigms for personal and professional fulfillment. The authors' harmoniously interwoven perspectives provide a deep sense of the powerful role that the notion of possibility can play in every aspect of life.
There is an infectiousness to the authors' enthusiasm and passion. A very useful takeaway for those with eating disorders bound by the construct that mistakes are failures, is how to experience and frame mistakes as possibility– an "How interesting!" moment to spur curiosity rather than disappointment or shame.
Fat and Food •
Fat and Food •
Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats
Each chapter looks at individual ingredients, in the same order as on a Twinkie package, so Ettlinger finds himself traveling to eastern Pennsylvania farms to study wheat, as well as to high-security plants that manufacture highly toxic chlorine. Twinkie ingredients "are produced by or dependent on nearly every basic industry we know." It is an unusual and approachable take on our enormous food industrial complex that is so complicated and security-laden that even those making the product have no idea from where many of the ingredients come.
There is profound moral panic surrounding what are now called: “not-food” — highly-processed foods that supposedly harm us, causing sickness and early death. Unfortunately, systematic reviews and meta-analyses simply don’t support that panic. Sure, the creation of ultra-processed foods is arcane, complex and largely hidden from view and that’s why this book is interesting for its efforts to demystify.
Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture
Drawing from his research on a wide range of ancient and modern societies, the author offers theories of the effects of regulations governing comestibles in various cultures, and that "good to eat" translates as "good to sell" in profit-conscious countries like the U.S. Whereas "good to eat" translates as "good for class stability" in class-driven countries of both bygone and modern eras. This is not a book for the queasy of stomach but it reinforces that how we arrive at thinking something is good to eat is not as conscious or as 'sensible' as we would like to think.
Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America's Obesity Epidemic
While the author suffers a bit from what I'd call single-source-itis, in fact a condition he rightly assigns to many other specialists in the field of “obesity”, he nonetheless provides previously overlooked and statistically relevant factors impacting the growing heaviness of Americans. Importantly, he uncovers some of the unsubstantiated guidelines for being clinically overweight and obese that originate from questionable CDC and NIH positioning documents in the 1980s and 1990s. He also theorizes that the disproportionate scorn and vitriol heaped on overweight white women has its origins in sexual competition. This book will force you to come face to face with preconceptions and misconceptions we have all wholeheartedly adopted in a society that presumes weight is a moral issue.
What’s Wrong With Fat?
This is a thorough book. The excerpt reads as “What's Wrong with Fat? presents each of the various ways in which fat is understood in America today, examining the implications of understanding fatness as a health risk, disease, and epidemic, and revealing why we've come to understand the issue in these terms, despite considerable scientific uncertainty and debate. Saguy shows how debates over the relationship between body size and health risk take place within a larger, though often invisible, contest over whether we should understand fatness as obesity at all. Moreover, she reveals that public discussions of the "obesity crisis" do more harm than good, leading to bullying, weight-based discrimination, and misdiagnoses.”
It is important to look at the social implications of the medicalization of fat— fat justice — and this book is one of best of the best.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
A well-argued and considered treatise on why cooking, and not carnivory, is likely responsible for brain development in earlier human species. Biological anthropologist Wrangham estimates that 1.8 million years ago, our ancestors began cooking and it resulted in physiological changes: our jaws, teeth and gastrointestinal system shrank and our brains expanded. We have become so fit for purpose that humans are the only living species that are not built to thrive on 100% raw food diets today. Wrangham's observations on division of labor to allow for dependable calorie intake in hunter/gatherer societies suggest that the sharing of food in human species had specific survival value.
This is yet another one of my favourites for making us think outside our biases. I also see interesting potential for what would become of the human species were ultra-processed foods able to act on our populations for millennia.
Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How We Live
by Marlene Zuk
There are few folks out there with eating disorders who have not been wooed by numerous food-group restrictive diets. Their attraction speaks to fears of illness and disability. Zuk's book is a thorough look at the misuse of evolutionary biology to argue for Paleolithic diets. We are as much a part of evolution today as 800,000 years ago and we experience layers of evolutionary change that occur even within our lifetimes (as with the symbiotic bacteria within our guts) such that we are exceedingly flexible and responsive omnivores.
Yet another book in the library here that is all about re-evaluating all the aphorisms we just blithely accept as truth.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living
Much of the healthy lifestyle, wellness and wellbeing industry of today originates with Kellogg (yes, of cornflakes fame). This is a history of John Harvey Kellogg and his Battle Creek Sanitarium.
With its roots in Calvinism, the pursuit of wellness was a spiritual endeavour. Kellogg’s influence thrives today not only in the healthy living movements, but also in the rise of eugenics yet again.
This is a thorough biography of the man, but also supremely relevant for those with eating disorders in dismantling all of the tenets we hold to be good and true to recognize them for what they were and are: false systems of
Medicine • Psychiatry • Sociology • Anthropology •
Medicine • Psychiatry • Sociology • Anthropology •
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
"Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not. " It’s relevant for those with eating disorders as communal care and nourishment is a facet of feeding that is hard to come by in our predominantly solo journeys these days. It is, however, something to consider when looking to support a robust remission from an eating disorder.
The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession
It may seem strange to include a book on scent in this reading section but I am including this highly readable book precisely because it provides a balanced and necessarily harsh view of the peer-reviewed process and the dogma and powerful industry interests that so often decapitate new theories before they have seen the light of day. Our sense of smell is how we eat and it is likely that it features prominently in the perception of abnormal eating behaviours in ways we have yet to consider or investigate at all.
The Secret History of the War on Cancer
by Devra Davis
The "War on Cancer"in our society was set out to find, treat, and cure a disease. Left untouched were many of the things known to cause cancer, including tobacco, the workplace, radiation, or the global environment. Proof of how the world in which we live and work affects whether we get cancer was either overlooked or suppressed. Phenomenal lobbying efforts from industries that make cancer-causing chemicals and agents that are rife in everyday consumer products, and pharmaceutical companies that profit from the drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease ensured that environmental triggers remained a no-go zone in this so-called war. This is really a life's research body of work and Davis covers it all.
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
Ehrenreich does a good job providing historical context for why positive-thinking is such an ingrained approach to life in America. Positive-thinking leads to avoidance, denial and levels of self-blame that are destructive. This is a book that generates tremendous vitriolic response from those who practice positive-thinking. However, excessive pessimism or optimism are two sides of the same coin: they originate with underlying anxieties about outcomes that are perceived as unacceptable or perhaps unsurvivable. The pessimist deals with significant anxiety when they consider having their hopes dashed, so they short-circuit it by always anticipating the worst which ensures they never have their hopes dashed. The optimist deals with anxiety when they consider they may have to deal with a negative outcome, so they short-circuit that by assuming that the power of positive-thinking will remove that possibility altogether.
White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine
by Carl Elliot
Carl Elliot is a professor of bioethics and I wish he'd been my prof. His exposé on the incestuous relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical companies is both eye-opening and entertaining. I quote him everywhere: "The best mark is often a person to whom the possibility of a con never occurs, simply because he thinks he is too smart to be tricked. Medical practice is like this. Many doctors know nothing about advertising, salesmanship, or public relations. They believe these are jobs for people who could not get into medical school. This probably why they are so easily fooled."
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
While I recognize that this is a book not directly related to eating disorders, Cordelia Fine is my meta-meta-analyst hero. Our minds are wondrous ever-changing, fluid, dynamic ecosystems and that may indeed be why it is possible to overcome harmful restrictive eating behaviours. Obliquely this book is also particularly relevant when it comes to the assumption that eating disorders are far more prevalent for women than men. What I have found with most DSM-categorized "mental disorders" is that there is endemic sexism that overlooks the possibility that the same genetic/environmental systems that underpin these so-called disorders are common to both men and women, and it is merely the expressions of these disorders that may be distinct (largely due to human sensitivity to apply societally consistent expressions even with the confines of mental illness).
Wrong: Why experts* keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more
This book is a must read to gain much-needed perspective on how experts and their peer-reviewed publications must be approached with caution. Freedman is a journalist who specializes in business, technology and medical journalism. As an aside, Freedman himself has fallen prey to accepting “obesity” as a disease when the actual scientific data to support that concept would not hold up under the scrutiny he recommends we follow when considering expert advice in general. In fact, I find that fact comforting for we all have blind-spots and it does not diminish any of the astute advice he provides in this book.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In the End
by Atul Gawande
It could just as easily have been titled "Being Alive". Yes, this is not a light read, but it is so beautifully written and the author conveys such complexity and empathy that words fail me in attempting to express how profoundly this book affected me and my sense of mortality (my own and the mortality of those near and dear to me in both my professional and personal lives). One great insight that Gawande makes that has stuck with me is that we tend to rate the importance of safety over autonomy as more important for our loved ones than ourselves. And that means we forget that our loved ones rate their own autonomy as more important and meaningful, just as we do for ourselves.
The Second Brain : The Scientific Basis of Gut Instinct and a Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestines
This is a technical but surprisingly approachable and witty book on the how the mind is really not just sitting between our two ears.
Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America
Does your doctor know how likely it is that proposed treatments will afford meaningful benefits? And do you? Each chapter covers off the uses and abuses of screening tests and medical and surgical interventions. We all over-estimate the value of having a negative screening test relative to the anxiety and actual risk associated with undertaking the test in the first place. Not many of us goes into all the rote screening recommendations with the following thought in the back of our minds: "Could I be harmed by the test itself? Could I receive an equivocal result that might mean further risky and unnecessary interventions? And what would be the course of action if the test is positive?" This is a good book for getting us to mull all these things over before we face snap decisions in a doctor's office.
Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression
by David Healy
I read this book many, many years ago and have re-read it a couple of times since then. Dr. Healy is a psychiatrist who is tireless (I don't know how he does it really) in his efforts to address psychiatry's very unsavoury relationship with pharmaceutical companies. In this book he provides a thorough and enlightening history on the development and application of anti-depressants on the population at large and the continuing efforts by the pharmaceutical industry to stifle information on the dangers of these psychoactive drugs.
Disease, Diagnoses, and Dollars: Facing the Ever-Expanding Market for Medical Care
Kaplan is professor of both public health and medicine. This book is most intriguing because it addresses the ethics of disease screening and treatment from the perspective of access as well as its value to both the individual and the population at large. Because we keep ratcheting screening guidelines as well as transforming more conditions into disease states, we now have an ever shrinking population of the excessively cared-for alongside the ever burgeoning uninsured and uncared-for. Most fascinating is that even excessive care for the wealthy few does not usually generate better outcomes or longevity for them in any case.
The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment
One of my two go-to books (the other one being David Healy's Let Them Eat Prozac) when it comes to the science of psychoactive drugs and their broad misuse in the treatment of mental illness. Dr. Moncrieff is a psychiatrist and there's nothing more potent than "an insider" telling it like it is. Her foundational argument is that none of these drugs is specific to any one mental illness. There are no "antidepressants" or "anxiolytics" or "neuroleptics". These are all drugs that knock down central nervous system function in a broad and unspecific way. That may have some limited use for patients in absolute crisis, but these drugs have very serious long term effects and impacts and are at best short-term acute prescription options for the most severely distressed patients out there.
Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients
Ray Moynihan and Allan Cassels show how drug companies are systematically using their dominating influence in the world of medical science. Drug companies are working, and succeeding, at defining the boundaries that define illness. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness, and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Selling Sickness reveals how expanding the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt national healthcare systems all over the world.
Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation
by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim.
Seriously this should be compulsory reading for everyone. It should be mandatory reading for all ob/gyns for that matter too. It's a fascinating read and you will learn all the things you should know about periods but don't.
Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are
The author takes a look at the prevalence in our society today of medicating what are perhaps average and passing emotional states for adolescents and young adults, with anti-depressants. It's a philosophical discussion on what this approach might mean for an entire generation who may have their ability to develop emotional resilience short-circuited through the use of anti-depressants. Sharpe takes a very balanced approach and is quick to identify when these drugs have value for those with major depressive disorders. Overall an interesting read.
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
A fascinating look at anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, schizophrenia in Zanzibar and depression in Japan. A clear case for why the symptomatology-based world of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders misses the forest for the trees. Symptoms are generated through a cultural-sweep that the mind does to try to anchor the inherent dis-order that it is experiencing. Not that these conditions are made up, but rather that patients are unable to find a way to translate their inner world outward without the use of culturally-significant symptoms.
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Most patients with eating disorders have been placed on numerous psychoactive drugs. Antidepressants are often prescribed despite the fact that they have no clinical data to support their use in treating depression, let alone have any value in the treatment of eating disorders. Anxiolytics (anti-anxiety drugs) are also commonly prescribed and while they do have short-term or crisis-level clinical value, they can actually interfere with psychotherapeutic efforts to re-train responses to threatening stimuli (in the case of those with eating disorders that will be food). And that doesn't even touch on the fact that many patients with eating disorders have been prescribed amphetamines and/or neuroleptics under the guise of treating attentional, obsessional and psychotic symptoms. Whether you are on these drugs, or they have been recommended to you by your physician/psychiatrist, and you only read one book on the topic of psychiatry at all, then this is that book.