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'Poignant and lyrical...Slater's experience makes her a convincing
travel guide into the history, creation and future of
psychotropics.' - The New York Times Book Review A groundbreaking
and revelatory story of the psychotropic drugs that have shaped our
minds and our reality. As our approach to mental illness has
oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so
have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, an
ever-increasing number of people throughout the globe are taking a
psychotropic drug, yet nearly seventy years after doctors first
began prescribing them, we still don't really know exactly how or
why they work - or don't work - on what ails our brains. In The
Drugs that Changed Our Minds, Lauren Slater offers an explosive
account not just of the science but of the people - inventors,
detractors and consumers - behind our narcotics, from the earliest,
Thorazine and Lithium, up through Prozac, Ecstasy, 'magic
mushrooms', the most cutting-edge memory drugs and neural implants.
In so doing, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself and
illuminates the signature its colourful little capsules have left
on millions of brains worldwide, and how these wonder drugs may
heal us or hurt us. Praise for the book: 'A powerful new book' -
The Daily Mail 'The messy history and brave future of psychotropic
drugs' - O Magazine 'Vivid and thought-provoking' - Harper's
Magazine 'Ambitious...Slater's depictions of madness are terrifying
and fascinating' - USA Today 'Vigorous research and intimate
reflection...highly compelling' - Kirkus
A century can be understood in many ways - in terms of its
inventions, its crimes or its art. In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren
Slater sets out to investigate the twentieth century through a
series of ten fascinating, witty and sometimes shocking accounts of
its key psychological experiments. Starting with the founder of
modern scientific experimentation, B.F. Skinner, Slater traces the
evolution of the last hundred years' most pressing concerns - free
will, authoritarianism, violence, conformity and morality.
Previously buried in academic textbooks, these often daring
experiments are now seen in their full context and told as stories,
rich in plot, wit and character.
Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a
box, Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's
obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an
experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis.
Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these
often daring experiments have never before been narrated as
stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.
A stunning new book about the role of animals in our lives, by a
popular and acclaimed writer
From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside
her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of
sleeping cows and a "Private Way" full of the wondrous and creepy
creatures of the wild--spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and
foxes--Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from her troubled
life. As she matures, her attraction to animals strengthens and
grows more complex and compelling even as her family is falling to
pieces around her. Slater spends a summer at horse camp, where she
witnesses the alternating horrific and loving behavior of her
instructor toward the animals in her charge and comes to question
the bond that so often develops between females and their equines.
Slater's questions follow her to a foster family, her own parents
no longer able to care for her. A pet raccoon, rescued from a hole
in the wall, teaches her how to feel at home away from home. The
two Shiba Inu puppies Slater adopts years later, against her
husband's will, grow increasingly important to her as she ages and
her family begins to grow.
Slater's husband is a born skeptic and possesses a sternly
scientific view of animals as unconscious, primitive creatures, one
who insists "that an animal's worth is roughly equivalent to its
edibility." As one of her dogs, Lila, goes blind and the medical
bills and monthly expenses begin to pour in, he calculates the
financial burden of their canine family member and finds that Lila
has cost them about $60,000, not to mention the approximately 400
pounds of feces she has deposited in their yard. But when Benjamin
begins to suffer from chronic pain, Lauren is convinced it is
Lila's resilience and the dog's quick adaptation to her blindness
that draws her husband out of his own misery and motivates him to
try to adjust to his situation. Ben never becomes a true believer
or a die-hard animal lover, but his story and the stories Lauren
tells of her own bond with animals convince her that our
connections with the furry, the four-legged, the exoskeleton-ed, or
the winged may be just as priceless as our human relationships.
"The $60,000 Dog" is Lauren Slater's intimate manifesto on the
unique, invaluable, and often essential contributions animals make
to our lives. As a psychologist, a reporter, an amateur naturalist,
and above all an enormously gifted writer, she draws us into the
stories of her passion for animals that are so much more than pets.
She describes her intense love for the animals in her life without
apology and argues, finally, that the works of Darwin and other
evolutionary biologists prove that, when it comes to worth, animals
are equal, and in some senses even superior, to human beings.
"From the Hardcover edition."
Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be
family.
Lauren Slater's rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever
creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two
children, and three houses later, she came around to the
challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In
these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of
domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring
realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious
institution called "family." She asks difficult questions and
probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these
pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her
determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in
deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the
eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her
newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness.
She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy
and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells
us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy
and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she
saw him catch fire in a chemical accident.
It's not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs
into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon
of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and
being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous,
and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex
questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes
uncomfortable truths.
"The essays in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations on
birthing, dying, and all the business in between," writes Lauren
Slater in her introduction to the 2006 edition. "They reflect the
best of what we, as a singular species, have to offer, which is
reflection in a context of kindness. The essays tell hard-won tales
wrestled sometimes from great pain."
The twenty powerful essays in this volume are culled from
periodicals ranging from The Sun to The New Yorker, from Crab
Orchard Review to Vanity Fair. In "Missing Bellow," Scott Turow
reflects on the death of an author he never met, but one who
"overpowered me in a way no other writer had." Adam Gopnik
confronts a different kind of death, that of his five-year-old
daughter's pet fish -- a demise that churns up nothing less than
"the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchock's
Vertigo."
A pet is center stage as well in Susan Orlean's witty and
compassionate saga of a successful hunt for a stolen border collie.
Poe Ballantine chronicles a raw-nerved pilgrimage in search of
salvation, solace, and a pretty brunette, and Laurie Abraham, in
"Kinsey and Me," journeys after the man who dared to plumb the
mysteries of human desire. Marjorie Williams gives a harrowing yet
luminous account of her life with cancer, and Michele Morano muses
on the grammar of the subjunctive mood while proving that "in
language, as in life, moods are complicated, but at least in
language there are only two."
This complete guide provides a comprehensive overview of the
psychological issues that concern women most. Arguing that women
need to understand their mental health as more than a question of
disorder or normality, it begins with the life cycle, helping women
understand the major issues and biological changes associated with
young adulthood, middle age, and old age. It also addresses the
psychological importance of women's sexuality, relationships,
motherhood and childlessness, trauma, and illness, and discusses
how social contexts, such as poverty and racism, affect mental
health.
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