Category Health, mind and body books

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness?

It’s tempting to dismiss the proliferation of labels as a fad, but there’s more to this phenomenon than a simple culture-war reading allows

My psychological research rarely makes good comedy material, but in a standup show in London recently, those two worlds collided. One of the jokes was about how everyone is getting diagnosed with ADHD these days – about the social media videos that encourage viewers to identify common human experiences, like daydreaming or talking a lot, as evidence of the condition. The audience laughed because everyone got it – they’ve all witnessed how common it seems to have become in the last few years. When something becomes this prevalent in society, and this mystifying, it’s no surprise it ends up as a punchline.

Part of my work as an academic involves trying to solve the puzzle of why so many more people, especially young people, are reporting symptoms of mental illness compared to even five or 10 years ago. (ADHD is a form of neurodivergence, rather than a mental illness, but both have seen an increase, so they are related questions.) Whenever I talk about this – to colleagues, school staff, parents – it doesn’t take long until someone brings up that judgment-laden, hot-button word: overdiagnosis.

Continue reading...

Wise by Frank Tallis review – how to turn your midlife crisis into a hero’s journey

A psychologist’s gripping guide to surviving dark nights of the soul offers both comfort and insight

I’m proud of how mild-mannered my midlife crisis is. While the cliche involves the purchase of a Porsche or a frantic fling with a colleague, I’ve mainly fallen back into the geeky preoccupations of my youth, such as founding poetry clubs and playing niche racket sports. Nevertheless, on the cusp of turning 50, and having just been beaten by my 11-year-old at Scrabble, I’m thrilled to have found a book that addresses my small struggle: an elegant discourse on the deep wisdom that I’m hoping will characterise my remaining years.

First, the author, a clinical psychologist named Frank Tallis, diagnoses the problem. Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker’s 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say “die”, preferring euphemisms such as “pass away”. In this Instagram age, our lives are dominated by filters and distractions. The crisis strikes when reality can’t be held at bay any longer. We lose our parents. Then we notice, inevitably, that we are now at the front of the queue.

Continue reading...

The Divided Mind by Edward Bullmore review – do we now know what causes schizophrenia?

A brilliant history of psychiatric ideas suggests we are on the cusp of a transformation in our understanding of severe mental illness

In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52.

Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients admitted, 20% were deemed suspicious. It was then that Rosenhan revealed this had been a ruse as well: no pseudopatients had been sent to the hospital at all. Not only had doctors failed to spot sane people in their midst; they couldn’t reliably recognise the actually insane.

Continue reading...

Does ‘laziness’ start in the brain?

Understanding the surprising mechanism behind apathy can help unlock scientific ways to boost your motivation

We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.

But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.

Continue reading...

Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz review – the truth about relationships

In a series of revelatory case studies, a psychoanalyst lays bare the messy reality of romantic love

A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is “OK, acceptable”, more is evidence that she has been “having it off”, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy. A high-flying Fulbright scholar becomes a sex worker to avenge the father she hates. An ex-nun discovers that her decades of religious seclusion were driven by an unconscious fear of pregnancy. A troubled young woman, seeking redress for her psychological losses, steals large sums of money that she will never spend.

In Love’s Labour, the London-based, American-born psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz offers an antidote to the pat, sanitised love stories we absorb through romcoms, reality TV shows and other popular culture. Often, he writes, “easy stories obscure the hard ones”, and the hard ones are most true. “I like older guys”, the kleptomaniac tells him, an explanation that conceals: “I want a man to be the mother I never had.” In Grosz’s telling, psychoanalysis resembles a painstaking, collaborative act of excavation, removing layers of self-deception and motivated reasoning to discover the conflicting fears and desires that lie beneath.

Continue reading...

The Parallel Path by Jenn Ashworth review – a soul-searching walk across England

Forget the Salt Path – this writer’s introspective journey provides genuine food for thought

When Jenn Ashworth set out on Alfred Wainwright’s 192-mile coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees in the west to Robin Hood’s Bay in the east, she was stepping out of character. Her daily circular walks round Lancaster during lockdown were no real preparation, and a brief orienteering course was no guarantee that she wouldn’t get lost. She wasn’t walking for charity or running away from a marriage or, like the fell runner who’d done the route in 39 hours, trying to break any record. A homebody “inclined to slowness”, she was a 40-year-old novelist, professor and mother of two going off on her own for two-and-a-half weeks for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate.

Not that there weren’t contributory factors. Lockdown had left her with post-Covid cabin fever, itchy to be elsewhere after the long months of caring for her family and students (“a one-woman battle against entropy”). She also knew that at every pub and guest house she’d booked en route supportive letters would be waiting from her terminally ill but brilliantly animated friend Clive. Most importantly, although her walking wouldn’t be solitary, since she couldn’t avoid bumping into other (potentially annoying) hikers, she’d be “the sole owner of my own skin again”.

Continue reading...

Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar review – night terrors

The Guardian’s theatre critic’s imaginative exploration of life in the shadows

Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.

That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.

Continue reading...

Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure

From Van Gogh’s starry skies to the nocturnal workings of Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Highsmith, sleepless nights have long inspired heightened creativity. Could those artistic impulses actually help us to sleep?

I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep.

The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound.

Continue reading...