mental illness – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Oh, By the Way, I Have a Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | August 27, 2023August 27, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Those newly diagnosed with a mental illness usually face a bleak time. While a diagnosis is infinitely better than uncontrolled mental illness, sources of hope to overcome challenges can be few and far between. Many rightly focus on learning more about their psychological condition. Reestablishing your professional and personal lives, often wrecked by disease, becomes paramount. Some build on this knowledge and transition their career towards specializing in mental illness. However, few published stories are…

Healthcare Psychology

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…

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…

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…

Healthcare HIV/AIDS Psychology Society

My Nerves are Bad: Puerto Rican Women Managing Mental Illness & HIV Risk

By Scott J. Pearson | April 27, 2022May 7, 2022 by Scott J. Pearson

This sociological work examines a niche group with a lot of social factors going on that impacts their health. First, there is gender as these are women. Regionally and racially, these women are from Puerto Rico but now live in the mainland US. They are impoverished, like many who come from the island. They have to deal with very real health issues like mental illnesses and the looming risk of HIV. They have risk factors,…

Biography-Memoir Healthcare

Fallible: A Memoir of a Young Physician’s Struggle with Mental Illness

By Scott J. Pearson | April 24, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

As with most memoirs, this saga spans many sectors of life: religious faith (Mormon), an arduous journey (years of medical training), loneliness and solitude (missionary work in the Ukraine), deep, abiding love (a wife and kids), and obstacles (relentless anxiety). Jones relates his struggle with generalized anxiety disorder and in attaining a stable life. This difficulty is amplified by the fact that he undertakes psychologically stressful education to become a physician. The hardships never really…