Film and Book Reviews

The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head will appeal to lay readers who like to solve puzzles, as well as to seasoned clinicians who will be challenged by its wide array of intricate cases.

ECT is making something of a comeback because it remains a paragon of efficacy amidst other relatively disappointing treatments.

For those of us who treat seriously emotionally disturbed children, We’ve Got Issues is a welcome change from the invectives of those who believe that the use psychotropic medication is virtually criminal.

What Works for Psychiatrists in Community and Institutional Settings

This book is recommended for therapy trainees who are interested in relational psychodynamic approaches and concerned with putting these seemingly abstract concepts into “real world” practice.

As expected from an Oxbridge graduate, author Catharine Arnold’s Bedlam: London and Its Mad is a well-written and very readable book. “This book is for all whose lives are touched by madness” is a laudable objective.

I believe this book will serve as an invaluable resource for all students of psychodynamic theory as well as their teachers-and I would venture to say that this magisterial text is destined to become a classic.

This 3-part manual on sexual disorders is edited by 2 psychiatrists who have been engaged for more than 20 years in clinical treatment of patients with sexual problems.

In this autobiographic work, Darryl Cunningham explains mental illness in a succinct and novel way. It is already proving to be of use to both health professionals and mental health service clients. Published in the UK this year, its US release is scheduled for February 2011.

The preface explains why Prime Time is so needed. It provides a refreshing, nonjudgmental summary of how and why we’ve arrived at the 20-minute hour. This is important for disgruntled clinicians from the “good old days” as well as for early-career clinicians who have not learned anything better.

It is well known that black people, compared to white people, are much more likely to be diagnosed as suffering from ‘schizophrenia’ if they are seen at psychiatric units in the UK or USA. .

This book aims to demonstrate how, regrettably, over the last twenty years or so, typically American conceptions of mental illness have been exported successfully to the rest of the world. According to Watters, the often enthusiastic international reception of DSM-III and IV has homogenized human suffering all over the world.

With this creative and engaging eBook, the author challenges young people to resist “zombification by the zombie masters”-or, becoming addicted (“zombified”) by the individuals and systems (“zombie masters”) that sell and deal drugs and benefit from the misfortune of others.

With the transition of patients with mental illness from the beds of psychiatric institutions into the community the need for knowledgeable mental health professionals continues to grow. Correctional psychiatry has evolved in recent years and presents special challenges for clinicians, which this handbook deftly addresses. Contributing authors with various backgrounds provide a broad range of expertise.

Despite these divergent books, it is important to avoid characterizing ECT as controversial. The Shorter-Healy and Dukakis books should dampen the controversy, because they characterize ECT as a safe, effective, and important treatment that psychiatry almost forgot. With its emotion-laden accusations and name-calling, the Andre book will inflame opinions.

Screening for Depression in Clinical Practice, which reviews the current body of knowledge on mental health screening in the medical setting, is a reference text written primarily for the consultation-liaison specialist, but it will be of use to the general psychiatrist and the interested primary care physician or medical specialist.

Ultimately, Dr Ghaemi endorses a pluralistic approach and a “method-based psychiatry” in contrast to the eclecticism of the BPS. This method-based approach recognizes that one method may be more correct than others on the basis of empirical data and conceptual soundness (the “less is more” view), versus the BPS model, in which all methods can be equally correct (the “more is better” view).

The White Ribbon is an instant classic of European cinema. Filmed in black and white and set in a rural village in northern Germany circa 1912, it may remind you of early Bergman, Buñuel, and other great European filmmakers of the black-and-white era, but it is an homage to none of them.

Is A Clinician’s Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health what we have been waiting for? Yes and no. It contains solid descriptions of concepts such as the P value and confidence intervals, and it has extensive discussions of the history of modern statistical methods. Perhaps its greatest strength involves critiques of the interpretations of several studies that have mistakenly become cornerstones of clinical lore.

A Serious Man-a film that explores their Jewish roots in Minnesota. Not roots in the genealogical or autobiographical sense but from a removed and more philosophical perspective-what does it mean to be a Jew, both as a matter of social identity and as someone who is supposed to believe in God or Hashem, the word religious Jews invoke so as not to take the name of the Lord in vain. Hashem will roll so glibly off the tongues of the Coens’ Jews, it will seem more like affectation than piety.

The ancient role of conscience as a moral pilot is rejuvenated, and its neglected function as a spiritual daemon is refurbished for more psychologically minded modern readers.

Those who know Sacha Baron Cohen will tell you he is nothing like Brüno or the other characters he impersonates. The third son of an orthodox Jewish family, he grew up in a suburb of London, went to fancy British schools, and spent a year living in Israel. He read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where an interest in the role of American Jews in the Civil Rights Movement led to his thesis on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. Not the biography of a man you would imagine inventing Ali G, an American ghetto rapper; or Borat, an anti-Semitic TV reporter from Kazakhstan; or Brüno, a gay Austrian fashionista who wants to be as famous as that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler. These characters have made Baron Cohen one of the preeminent icons of popular culture.

“Do poets need to be mentally ill to produce great work? Is creativity heightened by treatment, or does treatment reduce emotional pain to the extent that the poet no longer has anything to say?”

After 18 years as a senior clinical psychiatrist at a New England inner-city mental health clinic, Dr Lawrence Climo was understandably surprised and saddened when he was given 2 weeks’ notice that his services were no longer needed. Financial constraints meant the clinic was replacing him with a nurse. Although his wife told him it was an opportunity, he remembers thinking that health care reform made him feel that his professional skills were “almost irrelevant or at least unmarketable.”

The foreword to the Textbook of Vio­lence Assessment and Management promptly reminds readers that the mental health system has been invested in the prediction and prevention of violence since its inception. In a field dedicated to promoting wellness via the management of cognition, emotion, and behavior, violent thoughts, feelings, and actions are of primary concern. When psychiatric illness or psychological distress manifests as violence, the costs in terms of human suffering are extreme, wreaking havoc in the lives of patients, clinicians, and society at large-often with irrevers­ible consequences.

From this book’s title, iBrain, I expected to learn about the positive impact of the computer world on the ever-evolving brain. I was in for a surprise. iBrain is a nuanced account of brain anatomy and function, brain plasticity, the impact-good and bad-of the Internet and Web access on the brain, and how to have a healthy brain and life in the face of our technological world. The book is written by psychiatrist-neuroscientist Gary Small, MD, director of the Memory and Aging Research Center at UCLA, and his wife, Gigi Vorgan, a film and television actor and writer. Small and Vorgan have a linear, easy-to-understand writing style that includes entertaining and educational case vignettes.

Make no mistake: Dr Torrey is on the side of the patient. He is enraged by the plight of the seriously mentally ill in the postinstitutional era, and he takes aim at a troika of villains-deinstitutionalization, the civil liberties bar, and the antipsychiatry movement. These 20th-century forces have conspired to relegate citizens with mental illness to a deplorable state of neglect that puts us all at risk. The Insanity Offense threads a needle of making us fear the violent mentally ill without stigmatizing them as a group.

For Allen, that film was the measure of Bergman’s genius, and it reached aesthetic heights that he conceded his own films would never attain. Bergman, like his Knight, Allen observed, could not put off the ultimate checkmate nor would his great art secure for him a personal afterlife as intellectuals wanted to believe. Allen was sure that Bergman would barter each great film he had made for another year of life so he could go on making films.

Book Review: What one thing could we do to improve our relationships, our work, and the way we learn? According to Dr Medina, we should make friends with our brains and learn to work with them, not against them. In Brain Rules, Medina outlines 12 practical ideas to help acquaint us with the ways our brains function and the ways we can engage positively as individuals and as a society.

Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do is a controversial, opinionated book that discusses the effects of computer gaming on children.