In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them.

"This ... portait of schizophrenia--the most malignant and least understood mental illness--by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, Chair of Columbia's legendary Psychiatry department, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient portraits and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope: that for the first time in human history, schizophrenia can not just be effectively treated, but even prevented"--

The cult classic that can still change your life…Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart-and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.|Luke Rhinehart has written four other acclaimed novels: Matari, Long Voyage...

"A sweeping history of American psychiatry-from jails to hospitals to the lab to the analyst's couch-by the award-winning author of Madness in Civilization. For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind-the sorts of things that were once called "madness"-have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, whose origins can be identified and from which one can be cured. But...

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness--how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people--sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society--went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all...

Alastair Santhouse knew something was wrong the night he was on call during his medical training and got the news that a woman on the way to the ER had died in the ambulance. That meant he could go back to sleep! But he couldn't. He was overtaken with the sense that his joyful reaction was terrible failure. That night began his long journey away from the ER and into psychiatry. Head First chronicles Santhouse's many years treating patients and his...

When Lt. Cmdr. Kraft's twin son and daughter were fifteen months old, she was deployed to Iraq. A clinical psychologist in the US Navy, Kraft's job was to uncover the wounds that a surgeon would never see. She put away thoughts of her children back home, acclimated to the sound of incoming rockets, and learned how to listen to the most traumatic stories a war zone has to offer. One of the toughest lessons of her deployment was perfectly articulated...

Includes material on "genocide survivors, witnesses to their own parents' murders, children raised in closets and cages, and victims of family violence ... explains what happens to the brain when a child is exposed to extreme stress, and he reveals how today's innovative treatments are helping ease children's pain, allowing to become healthy adults.