Public Mental Health

ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10 percent of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the US. In the second installment of Backfired, cohosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.

A pioneering physician reveals how childhood stress can lead to lifelong health problems, and shows us what we can do to break the cycle. Two-thirds of us have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, or ACE, such as abuse, neglect, parental substance dependence, or mental illness...

Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) argues humans can't fully grasp complex issues. We rely on simplified ideas (stereotypes) and media portrayals ("pseudo-environments") to form opinions.

This advisory calls attention to the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health. It explores and describes the current evidence on the positive and negative impacts of social media on children and adolescents, some of the primary areas for mental health and well-being concerns, and opportunities for additional research to help understand the full scope and scale of social media’s impact.

How to Weep in Public is both a tongue-in-cheek advice guide (from a person who has no business giving advice to anyone!) and one woman's breathless journey to consistently put on pants, or at least get out of bed in the morning. Beginning with her earliest blue moments of infancy and hopscotching through her exploration of the world of pharmaceuticals before bounding right back to her parents couch, Jacqueline Novak will introduce you to the ABCs (Adderall! Benzos! Catatonia!) of depression and reveal, funnily enough, that a lot can happen even when you're standing still.

In her raw and resonant debut novel, René Peña-Govea seamlessly interweaves prose and poetry to uplift the power of language, the courage to fight injustice, and the complex beauty of finding your people—perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and Carolina Ixta’s Shut Up, This...

A road map to free your kids from the harms of digital technology and to recover the beauty, wonder, and true purpose of childhood—by a leading tech policy expert It’s no secret that addictive digital technologies like smartphones and social media apps are harming a generation of kids...

An examination of how suicide prevention efforts largely fail due to the mistaken assumption that greater mental health awareness is the key to saving lives.

New York Times-bestselling author Ron Powers offers a searching, richly researched narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia. From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the...

The Sane Society is a continuation and extension of the brilliant psychiatric concepts Erich Fromm first formulated in Escape from Freedom; it is also, in many ways, an answer to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Fromm examines man’s escape into over conformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society: Modern humanity has, he maintains, been alienated from the world of their own creation. Here Fromm offers a complete and systematic exploration of his “humanistic psychoanalysis.”

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.

This well-researched and highly critical examination of the state of our mental health system by the industry's most relentless critic presents a new and controversial explanation as to why—in spite of spending $147 billion annually—140,000 seriously mentally ill are homeless, 390,000 are incarcerated, and even educated, tenacious, and caring people can't get treatment for their mentally ill loved ones.

Weaving together historical examples, scientific studies, and compelling court cases - from the border collie put on trial in Kentucky to the five teenagers who falsely confessed in the Central Park Jogger case - Benforado shows how our judicial processes fail to uphold our values and protect society's weakest members. With clarity and passion, he lays out the scope of the problem and proposes a wealth of reforms that could prevent injustice and help us achieve true fairness and equality before the law.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.

You have the power within you to transform the quality of your daily life experience, through learning simple relaxation skills, so that you can enjoy the world around you as much as possible! You have much more control over your body than you realise, and if you learn to relax your muscles for just a few minutes every day, this will have a really beneficial effect on your health and sense of well-being. How does this relaxation technique work? When you face the challenges of daily life, each single day, there is a slow build-up of tension in your muscles, and unless you take time out to ...

A love letter to the rookie in all of us: Singer-actor Joshua Bassett's fearless memoir in verse about surviving the darkest moments of fame, addiction, and mental health struggles—and finding hope on the other side. "We're all figuring it out as we go along. Even the 'pros.'" This brutally...

Mainstream health science has let you down. Weight loss is not the key to health, diet and exercise are not effective weight-loss strategies, and fatness is not a death sentence. Body Respect debunks common myths about weight, including the misconceptions that BMI can accurately measure health, that fatness necessarily leads to disease, and that dieting will improve health. The authors also help make sense of how poverty and oppression - such as racism, homophobia, and classism - affect life opportunity, self-worth, and even influence metabolism.

A veteran journalist discovers an ancient system of speech techniques for overcoming the fear of public speaking—and reveals how they can profoundly change our lives. In 2010, award-winning journalist John Bowe learned that his cousin Bill, a longtime extreme recluse living in his parents’...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The definitive guide to helping tweens and teens set boundaries online when technology and social media prioritize being online 24/7 over privacy “Essential reading . . . With empathy and insight, Devorah Heitner sheds light on how parents’ scrutiny and monitoring of...

Science doesn't speak for itself. Neck-deep in work that can be messy and confounding and naïve in the ways of public communication, scientists are often unable to package their insights into the neat narratives that the public requires. Enter celebrities, advocates, lobbyists, and the funders behind them, who take advantage of scientists' reluctance to provide easy answers, flooding the media with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In Bad Advice, Paul A. Offit shares hard-earned wisdom on the dos and don'ts of battling misinformation.