Book Reviews

In The Inflamed Mind, Dr. Bullmore posits a new theory for the cause of depression: bodily inflammation. Guiding the reader through a timeline of medicinal practice, Bullmore synthesizes historical accounts with anecdotal references to make a compelling case for the link between inflammation and depression.

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, for Binge Eating: A Mindful Eating Program for Healing Your Relationship With Food and Your Body is designed to assist readers in altering their eating habits. As the title implies, the author incorporates mindfulness exercises for readers to practice at their own pace to increase their self-awareness of appetite and compulsive eating habits.

If we put blinders on, if we ignore the entirety of a person’s experience, including the impact of our own background, our own sense of have and have not, we are setting up yet another dysfunctional experience.

In the Second Edition of her book, Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg revisits her 10 techniques for dealing with anxiety. She also revisits the companion workbook that provides activities to guide implementation of the techniques. These books are very accessible, even with the dispersed neuroscience throughout; they also have the advantage of catering to a wide audience including, but not limited to, those who are participating in psychotherapy. Her 10 techniques offer various ways to manage three arenas in which anxiety manifests itself: the body, the mind, and behavior. The workbook offers several, different ways to make the managing of anxiety actionable and consistent. By taking this two-pronged approach, Dr. Wehrenberg captures a large swath of information and applies it thus making her books a potential one-stop-shop for anxiety management. To fully appreciate the workbook, one must first read the technique book that serves to explain, in depth, what they are, why they work, and how to use them. Utilizing developments in neuroscience, Dr. Wehrenberg updates her 10 techniques by refining those at the forefront, providing new research-based evidence for them, and clarifying how they should be used (I).

Reviewed by: Lily Wu What is WEIRD? WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Henrich and his colleagues coined it about...

I started to write, “I’m the worst person to review a book on social media! I don’t use it.” Then, nearing the end of Dr Primack’s book, I realized, I use it more than I think. I don’t Twitter, nor Instagram. I don’t TicToK or Messenger. I post articles on LinkedIn and use Facebook for the magazine. But a sense of who? me? reached out and grabbed me when Dr Primack discussed Facebook and canned birthday wishes: how people, like me, are reminded of “friends” birthdays so we can offer a greeting, an emoji. What truly tripped me was his discussion on our own take away.

Can philosophers create change? Or do they merely entertain intellectual conversations, ask abstract questions about the nature of human thought, the nature of the universe, and the connections between them, and then ponder the possibilities? If you’re William Ferraiolo and you practice Stoicism, a philosophy of personal ethics, you are in fact learning “spiritual exercises” that lead to the development of “self-control and fortitude to overcome destructive emotions”.

Kamamalani hopes to create a ‘pregnant pause’ for conscious decision-making with a glimpse of the local and global implications.

Following decades of asylums, an over reliance on medication, and treatments like ECT, where popular opinion was that individuals with mental illness had to be locked up and medicated, it is no surprise that professionals in the mental health field have become more and more wary of pharmacological treatments. Additionally, because of growing knowledge about mental illness many mental health professionals recognize that medication is not a “quick fix” to mental illness. However, because of the horrors of the past and a societal tendency to devalue mental illness, popular opinion has shifted from one extreme, an over reliance on medication, to the opposite extreme, denying its usefulness altogether. In Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants, psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer works to defend the integrity of antidepressant medications in a world that has come to deny their validity.

The title alone prompted my email to Karnac for a reviewer’s copy of Bonnie Zindel’s newest book. Reading the forward cinched it. Bonnie’s skillful use of figurative language was a bit intimidating, okay totally intimidating. How dare I consider writing a review that wouldn’t fall flat, sound dimwitted and dull when juxtaposed to her masterful use of sound, sight, and syllabication. Bonnie’s taken poetic play to heart; here, just read this sentence aloud and you’ll hear what I mean: “thunderbolts strike, flying shadows lurk, golden arrows soar . . .” (pg. xv). We’ve got jagged energy piercing, ghostly apparitions hovering, a savior coming to the rescue. I read the forward twice simply to appreciate the language.