Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream PDF Download

Author: Carl Elliott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346668
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"Elliott's absorbing account will make readers think again about the ways that science shapes our personal identities."—American Scientist Americans have always been the world's most anxiously enthusiastic consumers of "enhancement technologies." Prozac, Viagra, and Botox injections are only the latest manifestations of a familiar pattern: enthusiastic adoption, public hand-wringing, an occasional congressional hearing, and calls for self-reliance. In a brilliant diagnosis of our reactions to self-improvement technologies, Carl Elliott asks questions that illuminate deep currents in the American character: Why do we feel uneasy about these drugs, procedures, and therapies even while we embrace them? Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?

Author: Richard G. Frank
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801889103
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The past half-century has been marked by major changes in the treatment of mental illness: important advances in understanding mental illnesses, increases in spending on mental health care and support of people with mental illnesses, and the availability of new medications that are easier for the patient to tolerate. Although these changes have made things better for those who have mental illness, they are not quite enough. In Better But Not Well, Richard G. Frank and Sherry A. Glied examine the well-being of people with mental illness in the United States over the past fifty years, addressing issues such as economics, treatment, standards of living, rights, and stigma. Marshaling a range of new empirical evidence, they first argue that people with mental illness—severe and persistent disorders as well as less serious mental health conditions—are faring better today than in the past. Improvements have come about for unheralded and unexpected reasons. Rather than being a result of more effective mental health treatments, progress has come from the growth of private health insurance and of mainstream social programs—such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, housing vouchers, and food stamps—and the development of new treatments that are easier for patients to tolerate and for physicians to manage. The authors remind us that, despite the progress that has been made, this disadvantaged group remains worse off than most others in society. The "mainstreaming" of persons with mental illness has left a policy void, where governmental institutions responsible for meeting the needs of mental health patients lack resources and programmatic authority. To fill this void, Frank and Glied suggest that institutional resources be applied systematically and routinely to examine and address how federal and state programs affect the well-being of people with mental illness.

Author: Paul J. Fitzgerald
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1491715421
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Is it possible, through use of existing psychiatric medications or talk therapy, to treat someone who has become slightly to severely mentally ill, and not only eliminate symptoms of his illness but also leave him better than well? This is a question with which eminent American psychiatrist, Peter Kramer, grappled in his landmark 1993 book, Listening to Prozac. Kramer concluded, based largely on responses of his own patients to the then relatively new antidepressant Prozac, that better than well may indeed be attainable in some persons. Not surprisingly, this is a controversial conclusion that has been met with a large degree of skepticism, including in a number of books that have since appeared. The current book explores this issue in detail, including analysis of cutting edge neuroscience and psychiatric research, concluding that "better than well" may indeed be attainable in some individuals. If so, this phenomenon may have broad reaching implications for medicine and society in general.

Author: Carl Elliott
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807061441
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
By New Yorker and Atlantic writer Carl Elliott, a readable and even funny account of the serious business of medicine. A tongue-in-cheek account of the changes that have transformed medicine into big business. Physician and medical ethicist Carl Elliott tracks the new world of commercialized medicine from start to finish, introducing the professional guinea pigs, ghostwriters, thought leaders, drug reps, public relations pros, and even medical ethicists who use medicine for (sometimes huge) financial gain. Along the way, he uncovers the cost to patients lost in a health-care universe centered around consumerism.

Author: William MacAskill
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698191102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately, we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result, even our best intentions often lead to ineffective—and sometimes downright harmful—outcomes. How can we do better? While a researcher at Oxford, trying to figure out which career would allow him to have the greatest impact, William MacAskill confronted this problem head on. He discovered that much of the potential for change was being squandered by lack of information, bad data, and our own prejudice. As an antidote, he and his colleagues developed effective altruism, a practical, data-driven approach that allows each of us to make a tremendous difference regardless of our resources. Effective altruists believe that it’s not enough to simply do good; we must do good better. At the core of this philosophy are five key questions that help guide our altruistic decisions: How many people benefit, and by how much? Is this the most effective thing I can do? Is this area neglected? What would have happened otherwise? What are the chances of success, and how good would success be? By applying these questions to real-life scenarios, MacAskill shows how many of our assumptions about doing good are misguided. For instance, he argues one can potentially save more lives by becoming a plastic surgeon rather than a heart surgeon; measuring overhead costs is an inaccurate gauge of a charity’s effectiveness; and, it generally doesn’t make sense for individuals to donate to disaster relief. MacAskill urges us to think differently, set aside biases, and use evidence and careful reasoning rather than act on impulse. When we do this—when we apply the head and the heart to each of our altruistic endeavors—we find that each of us has the power to do an astonishing amount of good.

Author: Tara Parker-Pope
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101404299
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
“The most credible and interesting marital self-help book of all time.”—Newsweek Editor of The Washington Post's Wellness Department and former New York Times columnist Tara Parker-Pope is one of the most popular and e-mailed journalists in the nation. In this eye-opening—and ultimately optimistic—look at marriage today, Parker-Pope reveals the heart behind the statistics to bust the myths and share the true secrets to marital happiness. Among her surprising findings: • most marriages today are succeeding • newlywed couples who don't fight are at a higher risk for divorce than those who do • how couples divide household chores influences how often they have sex Whatever their stage of life or marital status, readers will be fascinated and buoyed by this classic in the making.

Author: James Allen Hall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996316774
Category : Gay men
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2016 Essay Collection Competition. "Growing up queer in Florida in the 1980s, James Allen Hall's life has taken him to places that high culture rarely treads. Losing their once-thriving family business in the pre-crash 2000s, his broke and unstable parents move into a two-bedroom student apartment shared previously with just his brother. His mother routinely attempts or threatens suicide, his father is depressed. In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family's meth addiction, mental illnesses, and incarcerations, and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive. I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL is a tragic, funny, graceful book." --Chris Kraus "The essays collected in I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL are indeed harrowing--but more powerfully, they reveal a sensibility driven to make something beautiful and worthy of the raw and the rough. Hall's work lays bare all manner of vulnerability, not to confess or shock, but to reckon into language the nearly unsayable. And who exactly is at the center of this drive toward the light? A witness, an unrelenting seeker, a survivor, someone who's earned the right to judge but who withholds that too-easy gesture in favor of a clearer sight and the hard won belief that while we are bound together by so many complex tethers, including cruelty, we are especially linked by compassion, a force abundantly evident in this moving collection." --Lia Purpura "'What I am should be extinguished, ' writes James Allen Hall about his queerness, which despite a journey through youth troubled with violence and homophobia, manages to exist and persist. Yet the personal essays in I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL are more than expressions of pain, they are testaments to perseverance shaped by the acceptance of a flawed self, love for a complicated family and an unflappable wit. Thank you, James, for this extraordinary book so full of honest and compelling moments that will resonate with the aching heart inside each of us."--Rigoberto Gonzalez

Author: Tom Rath
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1595620400
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Shows the interconnections among the elements of well-being, how they cannot be considered independently, and provides readers with a research-based approach to improving all aspects of their lives.

Author: Steven Jay Lynn
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1452203172
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
CHAPTER 14: MAKING MARRIAGE (AND OTHER RELATIONSHIPS) WORK -- CHAPTER 15: THE JOYS OF LOVING: ENHANCING SEXUAL EXPERIENCES -- CHAPTER 16: RAISING OUR KIDS WELL: GUIDELINES FOR POSITIVE PARENTING -- CHAPTER 17: FINANCIAL SKILLS -- AUTHOR INDEX -- SUBJECT INDEX

Author: Carl Elliott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131782802X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and novelists such as Walker Percy, Paul Auster and Graham Greene, A Philosophical Disease brings to the bioethical discussion larger philosophical questions about the sense and significance of human life. Carl Elliott moves beyond the standard menu of bioethical issues to explore the relationship of illness to identity, and of mental illness to spiritual illness. He also examines the treatment of children born with ambiguous genitalia, the claims of Deaf culture, and the morality of self-sacrifice. This book focuses on a different sensibility in bioethics; how we use concepts, and how they relate to our own particular social institutions.