Mental Health Industry

ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10 percent of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the US. In the second installment of Backfired, cohosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, child psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children, usually boys, he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate and devoted researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry. Although he did offer individualized care to children he deemed promising, he also prescribed harsh institutionalization and even transfer to Spiegelgrund for children with greater disabilities, who, he held, could not integrate into the community.

According to some estimates, there are at least 600 different "brands" of psychotherapy, most of which are not supported by scientific research. Jonathan N. Stea provides a takedown of mental health misinformation and pseudoscience to educate and embolden listeners who wish to make informed decisions about their mental health. Listeners are empowered to protect themselves from mental health scams, charlatanry, and poor or misguided health practices that thrive in the multi-trillion-dollar wellness industry.

This is a story about madness. It all starts when journalist Jon Ronson is contacted by a leading neurologist. She and several colleagues have recently received a cryptically puzzling book in the mail, and Jon is challenged to solve the mystery behind it. As he searches for the answer, Jon soon finds himself, unexpectedly, on an utterly compelling and often unbelievable adventure into the world of madness.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

Today it is known as Roosevelt Island. In 1828, when New York City purchased this narrow, two-mile-long island in the East River, it was called Blackwell's Island. There, over the next hundred years, the city would build a lunatic asylum, prison, hospital, workhouse, and almshouse. Stacy Horn has crafted a compelling and chilling narrative told through the stories of the poor souls sent to Blackwell's, as well as the period's city officials, reformers, and journalists (including the famous Nellie Bly). Damnation Island re-creates what daily life was like on the island....

Anxiety Relief is a warm, compassionate, and expert audiobook to help anxious, panicky, or stressed people, written from both sides of the therapeutic couch! If you're suffering and you don't know how to gain relief from your anxiety, then this audiobook is for you.

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving, in this groundbreaking book in the vein of Daniel Pink's Drive and Charles Duhigg's Smarter Faster Better.

In Tell Me the Planets, Ben Platts-Mills tells stories about his work with survivors of brain injury, offering a rare glimpse into the world as seen through their eyes: charismatic Danny, whose criminal past has left him paralysed down one side, but who now helps others worse off than himself; Sid, whose memory for the present lasts only moments; and Liah, who is caught in a battle with the care system threatening to make her homeless.

Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves. From its beginnings as a theory of neurosis Freud developed psychoanalysis into a general psychology, which became widely accepted as the predominant mode of discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. Anthony Storr goes one step further and investigates the status of Freud's legacy today and the disputes that surround it.

This timely book offers a balanced and thoughtful review of the current mental health emergency and its impact upon and among medical professionals, supported by the best available evidence and illustrated through real-life cases. Recognizing the increasing stressors in the role including the impact of the environment in which doctors work, the book examines some of the key emotional drivers for this unhappiness among doctors at work—shame, stigma, suffering, and sacrifice—and offers practical steps to emotional and physical recovery.

A world-renowned psychiatrist reveals the fascinating story of psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption. Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But as Jeffrey Lieberman reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

Overthinking in Relationships and Survivors of Alzheimer's: A Caregiver's Guide to Mental Health and Aging emerges as a beacon of light, offering a repository of understanding and strategies for those entrenched in the dual challenges of caregiving and personal mental health. This compassionate guide delves deep into the heart of Alzheimer’s caregiving, coupled with the pervasive challenge of overthinking in personal relationships.

Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and naïve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In Bad Advice, Paul A. Offit shares hard-earned wisdom on the dos and don'ts of battling misinformation.

As we grapple with the world's worst pandemic for a century, our minds are on our health more than ever. But what should we rightfully expect of doctors? In this original and thought-provoking book, Sir David Haslam explores what good healthcare should achieve and asks how we pay for it. Informed by patient stories and data from across the world—from US big pharma to Britain's NHS—this is an urgent and often moving examination of our most important asset: our health.

An examination of how suicide prevention efforts largely fail due to the mistaken assumption that greater mental health awareness is the key to saving lives.

The ability to heal is not reserved for a gifted few. Anyone aching to ease the suffering of a sick friend or loved one can learn to become unconditionally present to the sick person rather than to the disease. Through stories filled with compassion, wisdom, and gentle humor, Dr. Jeff Kane shows readers how to use mindful attention, therapeutic listening, and truthful speech to help others heal.

Reports suggest that over 100m people around the world are living with Long COVID (more than 1.5m in the UK) yet reliable, clear information and guidance remains scarce. This book is the definitive guide to understanding, managing and treating the condition. Written by the world's leading immunologist Professor Danny Altmann and expert patient Gez Medinger, The Long COVID Handbook translates cutting-edge science, patient-led research and practical guidance with clarity.

On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of their tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, Special Agent Pete Dunbar attended a workshop at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, led by two agents who had hatched a radical new idea: What if criminals left a psychological trail that would lead us to them?