schizophrenia – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Second & Third Generation Antipsychotics: A Comprehensive Handbook

By Scott J. Pearson | July 12, 2025July 12, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Therapies for serious mental illness – namely, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – have become more prevalent in recent decades. Second- and now third-generation antipsychotics more effectively deal with symptoms while having less stigma-provoking side effects. These diseases, once intractable, are now relatively treatable. This book provides a well-documented summary of the research about these drugs. Reading this book is not for the feint of heart. It’s highly technical and requires significant biomedical literacy. Most patients…

Healthcare Psychology

Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill

By Scott J. Pearson | April 14, 2025April 14, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

In psychiatry, “serious mental illness” is substitute language for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. These two difficult diseases account for much of the homelessness that American cities see. Thus, these two diseases also account for much of where tax dollars go. The utterly tragic part, however, is that decent biomedical treatments exist for these diseases; in America, the infrastructure to treat them does not. Why? And what can be improved? This book, originally published in 1988…

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…