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The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

Michiko Kakutani

(0 Ratings) Rate It

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A stirring and incisive manifesto on America's slide away from truth and reason. Over the last...

ClareR (5726 KP) rated Assembly in Books

Oct 5, 2021

Assembly

Natasha Brown UK | 2021 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry

10.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

This is a really well written, thought provoking, short read. It is the day in the life of an unnamed, black, female protagonist, and the racism and misogyny that she encounters constantly both at work and in the wider community. Even when she is offered a promotion, her work colleagues believe she has got the job because of the colour of her skin and her sex. The fact that she has had to work twice as hard as anyone else to get where she is, is ignored.

I can’t help but think that she’s not happy in her job or her relationship, and her cancer diagnosis is pushing these matters to the front of her mind.

There’s a lot of racism in this novel, and the effects of that on the main characters psyche. To be constantly thought of as “less than” must be frustrating, depressing and maddening.

I’ll be very interested to read what comes next from Natasha Brown.

Kudos

BookblogbyCari (345 KP) rated The Psychopath Test in Books

Sep 11, 2018

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson | 2012 | Health & Fitness

8.2

(11 Ratings)

Book Rating

This book is remarkably entertaining – I can see why it’s having such a long stint in the bookseller’s shelves! It’s most definitely written for the lay person, and that goes some way to explaining the book’s longevity.

It logs the course of events taken by Jon Ronson as he interviews some people who are deemed crazy, or psychopathic, and some people who diagnose psychological traits. The start of Ronson’s journey is intriguing - it begins when various academics, predominately neuroscientists, are sent mysterious and cryptic packages. They all rush onto online forums trying to figure out what it’s all about. Unfortunately, this section comes to an abrupt and disappointing conclusion (no spoilers).

This all changes in Chapter 2, however. Here, Ronson meets a man, Tony, who claims to have faked mental illness in order to get put into a psychiatric facility rather than a traditional prison. The Scientologists are on his side, and they send Ronson Broadmoor’s file on Tony, but with significant omissions, which shed a whole new light on why Tony should be incarcerated.

Chapter 3 describes how in the 1960’s psychiatrist Elliot Barker, held several nude LSD-induced psychotherapy sessions for psychopaths. In Chapter 4, Ronson goes on a conference to learn about Bob Hare’s psychopath checklist, and by Chapter 5, he’s using it in an interview with a leader of a death squad, Toto Constant. In Chapter 6, he uses it in an interview with Al Dunlan, who apparently enjoyed firing 6.000 people from their jobs.

Following a brief interlude to discuss the media, conspiracy theorists and the second coming, the theme of psychopathy is picked up again in Chapter 9 which looks at criminal profiling, and how it was once used to lure one particular suspect into an unwarranted arrest.

Ronson goes off on another tangent in Chapter 10, which discusses the (very real) problem of an apparent ballooning of mental illness diagnoses. Here he tells the tale of what happened when a 4-year-old girl was given 10 pills a day for “childhood bipolar” disorder.

In Ronson’s concluding chapter, he attends a tribunal for the Tony of Chapter 2, and Tony’s fate is decided (no spoilers). By this point, Tony’s charisma has got Ronson taken in, in spite of Tony showing several psychopathic traits.

My take away from the book is that people will have eccentricities, diagnosis or not, and the way to tell if someone is dangerous, is by their actions. Ronson himself has spotted psychopathic traits in himself, despite being overly anxious and not the slightest bit evil. The book sheds a lot of light, not only on the nature of obtaining a diagnosis, but also on its implications.

Whilst I do recommend the book, this book is most definitely not a thorough analysis of the mental health industry, nor the criminal profiling industry. But for entertainment purposes it gets top marks. If you are looking for a more authoritative book on the mental health industry and diagnosis, I recommend Saving Normal by Allen Frances.