Psychology – Page 3 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind

By Scott J. Pearson | August 25, 2023August 25, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Kay Redfield Jamison is a well-known psychotherapist at Johns Hopkins who herself famously suffers from bipolar disorder. In 1996, she wrote eloquently about her journey in An Unquiet Mind. In this book, she posits the idea that to be most effective, healers – the doctors, counselors, and leaders – need to be healed themselves. To support her argument, she provides life narratives of many such eminent people, with a focus on the early-to-mid twentieth century.…

Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

By Scott J. Pearson | July 30, 2023October 20, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Attaining mental health from pervasive mental illness presents a contemporary challenge to the American healthcare system. Decades of progress in the basic science have not resulted in progress among outcomes, sadly. This reflects a broader observation that scientific advances have not been accompanied by necessary social advances. After a lifetime spent bettering patients’ lives as a psychiatrist and researcher, Thomas Insel here points the way to what an America with true mental health would look…

Family Psychology Research-Education

The Self-Driven Child: The Science & Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

By Scott J. Pearson | July 8, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Like many, I had parents who tried to engineer their lives for “success,” but paid no attention to my passions, interests, and approach to life. Firsthand, I’ve seen that parenting style’s folly and futility and want to take a different angle with my daughter and with other children I have influence over. Enter The Self-Driven Child. This book helped concretize abstract beliefs into a coherent philosophy. It distills basic child psychology into a workable format…

Healthcare History Psychology

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | June 20, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

I must begin this review with a confession of my biases. I have had bipolar disorder for 20 years and have learned through hard-fought experience how to control it. I also have progressed through medical school, but do not practice medicine due to side effects of medications for bipolar disorder. For a career, I build software infrastructure that supports the medical research system. I found Andrew Scull’s history of psychiatry enlightening. He clearly explains how…

Family Psychology

Parenting Teens with Love & Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible Adulthood

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023May 18, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

When my daughter was younger, I enjoyed reading Love and Logic for parents of young children. I found it helpful for establishing a good relationship with my daughter. And she has become a healthy preteen now. She is socially conscious, in an academic magnet school, and mostly interested in mature things. Importantly, she has become friends with my wife and me. Some of the credit for that goes to the framework the Love and Logic…

Management-Business Psychology

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life & Business

By Scott J. Pearson | March 4, 2023March 4, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Simple, popular, “arm chair” psychology says that life is full of “rational” choices that guide our lives. However, reasoning from human experience and psychological research, we’ve learned that habits guide most of our lives and prevent us from “choice fatigue.” How are we then to make use of habitual practices? In this book, Charles Duhigg analyzes how this impacts our business lives, our personal lives, and our society. He seeks to identify specific ways that…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS Psychology

HIV: Issues with Mental Health & Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

I write this review sixteen years after the publication of this book – a lifetime for rapidly advancing scientific insights. Nonetheless, this book represents an early attempt to understand how to deal with the relationship of HIV infection and severe mental illness (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or major depressive disorder). This problem was noted early in HIV’s emergence and began to be systemically addressed more in the 1990s. HIV infection rates at the time of publication…

Management-Business Psychology

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

By Scott J. Pearson | December 13, 2022December 13, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

Today’s world is an increasingly complex place. Many of us feel like we live disintegrated lives and are pulled in many directions. Yet people who have the highest societal impact tend to have the ability to focus, and throughout the centuries, writers like Henry David Thoreau have reminded us to simplify instead of complicate. In this book, McKeown seeks to convey these timeless philosophical lessons in a more contemporary format, geared around modern business lives…

Psychology Society

Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection & Bridging Divides

By Scott J. Pearson | November 2, 2022November 2, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

In recent decades, American society has collectively forgotten the virtue of fostering belonging in others. There seem to be many causes contributing to this central effect – political partisanship, technology, police injustices, lingering racism, the capitalistic thrust of media, and more. Cohen, a Stanford psychology professor, takes aim at this rich topic by presenting a comprehensive theory driven by research and then drawing out several practical applications. He does so to help modern social problems…