When Illness Goes Public

When Illness Goes Public PDF Author: Barron H. Lerner
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801889553
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 473

Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title, 2007, Choice magazine Steve McQueen had cancer and was keeping it secret. Then the media found out, and soon all of America knew. McQueen’s high profile changed forever the way the public perceived a dreaded disease. In When Illness Goes Public, Barron H. Lerner describes the evolution of celebrities' illnesses from private matters to stories of great public interest. Famous people who have become symbols of illness include Lou Gehrig, the first “celebrity patient”; Rita Hayworth, whose Alzheimer disease went undiagnosed for years; and Arthur Ashe, who courageously went public with his AIDS diagnosis before the media could reveal his secret. And then there are private citizens like Barney Clark, the first recipient of a permanent artificial heart, and Lorenzo Odone, whose neurological disorder became the subject of a Hollywood film. While celebrity illnesses have helped to inform patients about treatment options, ethical controversies, and scientific proof, the stories surrounding these illnesses have also assumed mythical characteristics that may be misleading. Marrying great storytelling to an exploration of the intersection of science, journalism, fame, and legend, this book is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of health and illness.

Media Madness

Media Madness PDF Author: Otto F. Wahl
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813522135
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
From Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Kojak, and Melrose Place, from books, music, cartoons, advertising, and newspapers, we all derive our images of mental illness. These omnipresent media portrayals are at the least insensitive, inaccurate, and unfavorable and at the worst stigmatizing and pernicious. In this important book, Dr. Otto Wahl examines the prevalence, nature, and impact of such depictions, using numerous examples from film, television, and print media. He documents the remarkable frequency of these images and demonstrates how the media has stereotyped the mentally ill through exaggeration, misunderstanding, ridicule, and disrespect. Media Madness also shows the damaging consequences of such stereotypes - stigma, rejection, loss of self-esteem, reluctance to seek, accept, or reveal psychiatric treatment, discrimination, and restriction of opportunity. The forces that shape current images of mental illness are clarified, as are the efforts of organizations and individuals to combat such exploitation.

When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air PDF Author: Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812988418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

The Thematic Evolution of Sports Journalism's Narrative of Mental Illness

The Thematic Evolution of Sports Journalism's Narrative of Mental Illness PDF Author: Ronald Bishop
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666927635
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Book Description
This book explores the evolution of how sports journalists have covered the struggle of professional athletes who have experienced mental illness. Combining historical research and narrative analysis, Ronald Bishop interrogates whether sports journalists have finally begun to cover the experience of mental illness with sufficient depth.

Lifelines

Lifelines PDF Author: Dr. Leana Wen
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1250186242
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
From medical expert Leana Wen, MD, Lifelines is an insider's account of public health and its crucial role—from opioid addiction to global pandemic—and an inspiring story of her journey from struggling immigrant to being one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. “Public health saved your life today—you just don’t know it,” is a phrase that Dr. Leana Wen likes to use. You don’t know it because good public health is invisible. It becomes visible only in its absence, when it is underfunded and ignored, a bitter truth laid bare as never before by the devastation of COVID-19. Leana Wen—emergency physician, former Baltimore health commissioner, CNN medical analyst, and Washington Post contributing columnist—has lived on the front lines of public health, leading the fight against the opioid epidemic, outbreaks of infectious disease, maternal and infant mortality, and COVID-19 disinformation. Here, in gripping detail, Wen lays bare the lifesaving work of public health and its innovative approach to social ills, treating gun violence as a contagious disease, for example, and racism as a threat to health. Wen also tells her own uniquely American story: an immigrant from China, she and her family received food stamps and were at times homeless despite her parents working multiple jobs. That child went on to attend college at thirteen, become a Rhodes scholar, and turn to public health as the way to make a difference in the country that had offered her such possibilities. Ultimately, she insists, it is public health that ensures citizens are not robbed of decades of life, and that where children live does not determine whether they live.

A Common Struggle

A Common Struggle PDF Author: Patrick Joseph Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN: 0399173323
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
Patrick J. Kennedy, the former congressman and youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, opens up about his personal and political battle with mental illness and addiction for the first time. This candid memoir focuses on the years from his 'coming out' about suffering from bipolar disorder and addiction to the present day, and examines his journey toward recovery while reflecting on America's treatment of mental health.

In the Kingdom of the Sick

In the Kingdom of the Sick PDF Author: Laurie Edwards
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802718019
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description
Citing a high percentage of Americans who live with chronic illness, an urgent call to action draws on scientific research and patient narratives to explore the role of social medial in medical advocacy, arguing that we must change attitudes about the link between health and lifestyle and provide appropriate and compassionate treatments. By the award-winning author of Life Disrupted. 25,000 first printing.

Actresses and Mental Illness

Actresses and Mental Illness PDF Author: Fiona Gregory
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351035487
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Actresses and Mental Illness investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation. By focusing specifically on actresses’ encounters with mental illness, Fiona Gregory builds on this earlier work and significantly supplements it. Through detailed case studies of both well-known and neglected figures in theatre and film history, including Mrs Patrick Campbell, Vivien Leigh, Frances Farmer and Diana Barrymore, it shows how mental illness – actual or supposed – has impacted on actresses’ performances, careers and celebrity. The book covers a range of topics including: representing emotion on stage; the ‘failed’ actress; actresses and addiction; and actresses and psychiatric treatment. Actresses and Mental Illness expands the field of actress studies by showing how consideration of the personal experience of the actress influences our understanding of her work and its reception. The book underscores how the actress can be perceived as a representative public woman, acting as a lens through which we can examine broader attitudes to women and mental illness.

The Invisible Kingdom

The Invisible Kingdom PDF Author: Meghan O'Rourke
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399573305
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION Named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by NPR, The New Yorker, Time, and Vogue “Remarkable.” –Andrew Solomon, The New York Times Book Review "At once a rigorous work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy.”—Esquire "A ray of light into those isolated cocoons of darkness that, at one time or another, may afflict us all.” —The Wall Street Journal "Essential."—The Boston Globe A landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and mysterious issues of our time: the rise of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color. Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

The Autism Matrix

The Autism Matrix PDF Author: Gil Eyal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656404
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Today autism has become highly visible. Once you begin to look for it, you realize it is everywhere. Why? We all know the answer or think we do: there is an autism epidemic. And if it is an epidemic, then we know what must be done: lots of money must be thrown at it, detection centers must be established and explanations sought, so that the number of new cases can be brought down and the epidemic brought under control. But can it really be so simple? This major new book offers a very different interpretation. The authors argue that the recent rise in autism should be understood an “aftershock” of the real earthquake, which was the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation in the mid-1970s. This entailed a radical transformation not only of the institutional matrix for dealing with developmental disorders of childhood, but also of the cultural lens through which we view them. It opened up a space for viewing and treating childhood disorders as neither mental illness nor mental retardation, neither curable nor incurable, but somewhere in-between. The authors show that where deinstitutionalization went the furthest, as in Scandinavia, UK and the “blue” states of the US, autism rates are also highest. Where it was absent or delayed, as in France, autism rates are low. Combining a historical narrative with international comparison, The Autism Matrix offers a fresh and powerful analysis of a condition that affects many parents and children today.