Effective Reading Strategies: Heather Weber

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 * A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book * One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 * A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2024 * Named a Best Book of 2024 by the Economist, the New York Post, and Town & Country * The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. "With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids." --Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes--communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children--and ourselves--from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

Approximately one in five adults in the United States experience mental illness on an annual basis, and emotional, behavioral, or mental disorders are just as prevalent among young people. Issues like homelessness and mass violence have brought mental illness into the spotlight, but have significant strides been made in addressing mental health issues in recent years or are these disorders still widely stigmatized? This volume explores the questions of whether mental health issues stem from uniquely American factors, how accessible treatment is to those who need it, and whether modern technology plays a role in America's mental health.

The Future of Mental Health drills to the heart of the current mental health crisis, where hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide receive unwarranted "mental disorder diagnoses." It paints a picture of how mental health providers can improve their practices to better serve individuals in distress and outlines necessary steps for a mental health revolution. Eric Maisel's goal is to inject more human interaction into the therapeutic process. Maisel powerfully deconstructs the "mental disorder" paradigm that is the foundation of current mental health practices. The author presents a revolutionary alternative, a "human experience" paradigm. He sheds a bright light on the differences between so-called "psychiatric medication" and mere chemicals with powerful effects, explains why the DSM-5 is silent on causes, silent on treatment, and wedded to illegitimate "symptom pictures." Maisel describes powerful helping alternatives like communities of care, and explains why one day "human experience specialists" may replace current mental health professionals. An important book for both service providers and service users, The Future of Mental Health brilliantly unmasks current mental health practices and goes an important step further: it describes what we are obliged to do in order to secure better mental health services--and better mental health--for everyone.

Learn hands-on coping strategies for managing anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health concerns with this "compassionate" guide from a licensed therapist and YouTube personality (John Green). Get answers to your most common questions about mental health and mental illness -- including anxiety, depression, bipolar and eating disorders, and more. Are u ok? walks readers through the most common questions about mental health and the process of getting help -- from finding the best therapist to navigating harmful and toxic relationships and everything in between. In the same down-to-earth, friendly tone that makes her videos so popular, licensed marriage and family therapist and YouTube sensation Kati Morton clarifies and destigmatizes the struggles so many of us go through and encourages readers to reach out for help.

Written in a lively and entertaining style, Facts and Fictions in Mental Health examines common conceptions and misconceptions surrounding mental health and its treatment. Each chapter focuses on a misconception and is followed by a discussion of related findings from scientific research. A compilation of the authors' "Facts and Fictions" columns written for Scientific American Mind, with the addition of six new columns exclusive to this book Written in a lively and often entertaining style, accessible to both the undergraduate and the interested general reader Each chapter covers a different "fiction" and allows readers to gain a more balanced and accurate view of important topics in mental health The six new columns examine myths and misconceptions of considerable interest and relevance to undergraduates in abnormal psychology courses Introductory material and references are included throughout the book

Mental wellbeing is an integral part of being, and feeling, healthy, and it is estimated that one in four people will suffer from some form of mental illness during their lifetime. In spite of this, it is often overlooked in mainstream healthcare. The overall aim of this book is to provide knowledge and understanding of how mental health affects human beings from conception through to end-of-life, and the challenges that society as a whole has to address in the treatment of mental health. Beginning with an exploration of historical, social and cultural contexts, the book then goes on to discuss mental health care, and mental health promotion, during pregnancy and early parenthood, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, adulthood for both men and women, and in older people. Containing reflective exercises, the chapters are designed to provide an easily-accessible and engagingly-written introduction to mental health. Containing chapters that can be read and reviewed in isolation, or used as an entire text, Mental Health Across the Lifespan: A Handbook provides a solid introduction to mental health for students. The book will also act as a useful reference for doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, allied health professionals, and health and social care support workers who have no specialist mental health training but often work in partnership with, and care for, people suffering from mental health issues.

Stop running on empty. Every day you juggle the many components that fill your life. Between work and family commitments, volunteer work, hobbies, and managing your physical and mental health, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and that you're letting someone down or neglecting some aspect of your life. But you can find ways to honor all of your commitments without collapsing. The HBR Guide to Work-Life Balance will help you: Evaluate and adjust your priorities Manage expectations Set and spend your time budget Make plans--and backup plans Understand how to make trade-offs Prioritize self-care Discover what works for you

Our jobs are often a big part of our identities, and when we are fired, we can feel confused, hurt, and powerless--at sea in terms of who we are. Drawing on extensive, real-life interviews, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health shines a light on the experiences of unemployed, middle-class professional men and women, showing how job loss can affect both identity and mental health.   Sociologist Dawn R. Norris uses in-depth interviews to offer insight into the experience of losing a job--what it means for daily life, how the unemployed feel about it, and the process they go through as they try to deal with job loss and their new identities as unemployed people. Norris highlights several specific challenges to identity that can occur. For instance, the way other people interact with the unemployed either helps them feel sure about who they are, or leads them to question their identities. Another identity threat happens when the unemployed no longer feel they are the same person they used to be. Norris also examines the importance of the subjective meaning people give to statuses, along with the strong influence of society's expectations. For example, men in Norris's study often used the stereotype of the "male breadwinner" to define who they were. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health describes various strategies to cope with identity loss, including "shifting" away from a work-related identity and instead emphasizing a nonwork identity (such as "a parent"), or conversely "sustaining" a work-related identity even though he or she is actually unemployed. Finally, Norris explores the social factors--often out of the control of unemployed people--that make these strategies possible or impossible.   A compelling portrait of a little-studied aspect of the Great Recession, Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health is filled with insight into the identity crises that unemployment can trigger, as well as strategies to help the unemployed maintain their mental strength.  

The majority of university students in the US and around the world are women (Economist, 2006). This recent increase in the education of women has allowed their employment rate to inflate, leading to an influx of issues surrounding the work-life balance. The era surrounding World War II led to an amplified presence of women seeking opportunities for a career, which in turn led to tensions at home and in the workplace as women try to balance the roles of family with a career. Many women have joined men in the provider role and the dual earner family has now become the norm (Gornick and Myers 2003). Traditional roles have shifted as women and men are both parents and workers. The picture of the career women and mother is divided and multi-faceted in existing research findings and opinions. Commonly assessed issues include the social implications of the dual roles of females, cultural norms, workplace policies with attention to female-specific hurdles, and marital satisfaction in gender roles. Various research studies suggest that marital relationships have become more egalitarian (Bielenski and Wagner, 2004), while others find that a large number of well-educated women have left careers for full-time motherhood (Belkin, 2003; Warner, 2005). In 2009, a research group was formed at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology to explore the competing narratives of women's lives as they balance their work activities with the demands of marriage and motherhood. The ultimate goal of this project was to understand the work-life balance issues of women in the workforce. This work is now known as the Digital Women's Project (Weber, 2011) and has collected over 400 interviews of women to explore themes around work-life balance. This phenomenological analysis utilizes a narrative life-course framework created by Giele (2008) to explore identity, relational style, drive and motivation, and adaptive style in order to understand the work-life balance of women. Women in Leadership and Work-Family Integration brings together the findings of this research group.

Every year, one in four American adults suffers from a diagnosable mental health disorder. In these true stories, writers and their loved ones struggle as their worlds are upended. What do you do when your father kills himself, or your mother is committed to a psych ward, or your daughter starts hearing voices telling her to harm herself--or when you yourself hear such voices? Addressing bipolar disorder, OCD, trichillomania, self-harm, PTSD, and other diagnoses, these stories vividly depict the difficulties and sorrows--and sometimes, too, the unexpected and surprising rewards--of living with mental illness.

"The most important book about schizophrenia in decades, and perhaps ever...a total game-changer." --Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind A comprehensive, deeply researched, and highly readable portrait of schizophrenia--its history, its various manifestations, and how today's treatments have promising and often lifesaving potential. This "incredibly captivating" (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies) portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects--and we're on the verge of being able to prevent the disease's onset entirely. Drawing on his four-decade career, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman expertly illuminates the past, present, and future of this historically dreaded and devastating illness. Interweaving history, science, and policy with personal anecdotes and clinical cases, Malady of the Mind is a rich, illuminating experience written in accessible, fluid prose. From Dr. Lieberman's vantage point at the pinnacle of academic psychiatry, informed by extensive research experience and clinical care of thousands of patients, he explains how the complexity of the brain, the checkered history of psychiatric medicine, and centuries of stigma combined with misguided legislation and health care policies have impeded scientific advances and clinical progress. Despite this, there is reason for optimism: by offering evidence-based treatments that combine medication with psychosocial services and principles learned from the recovery movement, doctors can now effectively treat schizophrenia by diagnosing patients at a very early stage, achieving a mutually respectful therapeutic alliance, and preventing relapse, thus limiting the progression of the illness. Even more promising, decades of work on diagnosis, detection, and early intervention have pushed scientific progress to the cusp of prevention--meaning that in the near future, doctors may be able to prevent the onset of this disorder. A must-read for those interested in medical history, psychology, and those whose lives have been affected by schizophrenia, this "penetrating, important" (Andrew Solomon, author of Noonday Demon) work offers a comprehensive scientific portrait, crucial insights, sound advice for families and friends, and most importantly, hope for those sufferers now and future generations.

"An honest, engaging and most of all, hopeful book." --Adam Kay, BAFTA-winning, multi-million-bestselling author, TV writer and performer. "Warm, funny and devastatingly honest. An incredibly insightful story full of hope and resilience." --Dr Amir Khan, Sunday Times bestselling author and Resident Doctor for ITV's Lorraine and Good Morning Britain "An inspiring rebuke to the nihilism which prevails in society about persons living with mental illness due to myths, misinformation and stigma.... Professor Hankir's personal journey bursts with courage, resilience and hope." --Vikram Patel, Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, USA Explore mental health, wellness, and illness in this engaging and insightful discussion from a practicing psychiatrist who himself lives with a mental health condition In Breakthrough: A Story of Hope, Resilience and Mental Health Recovery, World Health Organization Award Winning psychiatrist, former psychiatric patient and mental health advocate Dr. Ahmed Hankir delivers a unique and powerful insight into mental health and wellness, mental illness, mental health treatment, and the culture surrounding mental health by tracing his own personal recovery journey from impoverished and shunned psychiatric patient, to becoming an NHS Consultant psychiatrist. In the book you'll explore many of the issues currently dominating the discussion of mental health and illness, including the impacts of poverty, unemployment, the cost of living crisis, homelessness, addictions, the use of medication to treat mental illness, the widespread prevalence of stigma, discrimination and racism in mental health and much more. You'll also find: Comprehensive discussions about how to overcome shame and stigma to seek help if you're suffering from a mental illness. Explorations of how mental health practitioners and family members of people living with mental health conditions can themselves remain healthy as they care for others. Examinations of why mental health related stigma remains so stubbornly common in our societies and what we can do to combat it. Breakthrough is a resource of hope and a companion for people suffering in silence who feel isolated and disconnected from society. It will also be of interest to mental health practitioners, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, addictions specialists, carers and clients. The take home messages are clear: living with a mental health condition is nothing to be ashamed about and, with the right support, recovery is a reality for the many and not the few.

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 infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted love ones, Powers limns our fears and myths about mental illness and the fractured public policies that have resulted. Braided with that history is the moving story of Powers's beloved son Kevin -- spirited, endearing, and gifted -- who triumphed even while suffering from schizophrenia until finally he did not, and the story of his courageous surviving son Dean, who is also schizophrenic. A blend of history, biography, memoir, and current affairs ending with a consideration of where we might go from here, this is a thought-provoking look at a dreaded illness that has long been misunderstood. "Extraordinary and courageous . . . No doubt if everyone were to read this book, the world would change." -- New York Times Book Review

In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds. But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new "biological revolution" was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry's waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well. In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones. A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

WINNER: Best Autobiography/Memoir, 2018 Best Book Awards, sponsored by American Book Fest Glenn Close says:"Another Kind of Madness is one of the best books I've read about the cost of stigma and silence in a family touched by mental illness. I was profoundly moved by Stephen Hinshaw's story, written beautifully, from the inside-out. It's a masterpiece." A deeply personal memoir calling for an end to the dark shaming of mental illness Families are riddled with untold secrets. But Stephen Hinshaw never imagined that a profound secret was kept under lock and key for 18 years within his family--that his father's mysterious absences, for months at a time, resulted from serious mental illness and involuntary hospitalizations. From the moment his father revealed the truth, during Hinshaw's first spring break from college, he knew his life would change forever. Hinshaw calls this revelation his "psychological birth." After years of experiencing the ups and downs of his father's illness without knowing it existed, Hinshaw began to piece together the silent, often terrifying history of his father's life--in great contrast to his father's presence and love during periods of wellness. This exploration led to larger discoveries about the family saga, to Hinshaw's correctly diagnosing his father with bipolar disorder, and to his full-fledged career as a clinical and developmental psychologist and professor. InAnother Kind of Madness, Hinshaw explores the burden of living in a family "loaded" with mental illness and debunks the stigma behind it. He explains that in today's society, mental health problems still receive utter castigation--too often resulting in the loss of fundamental rights, including the inability to vote or run for office or automatic relinquishment of child custody. Through a poignant and moving family narrative, interlaced with shocking facts about how America and the world still view mentalhealth conditions well into in the 21st century,Another Kind of Madness is a passionate call to arms regarding the importance of destigmatizing mental illness.

"It hurts to be beautiful" has been a cliché for centuries. What has been far less appreciated is how much it hurts not to be beautiful. The Beauty Bias explores our cultural preoccupation with attractiveness, the costs it imposes, and the responses it demands. Beauty may be only skin deep, but the damages associated with its absence go much deeper. Unattractive individuals are less likely to be hired and promoted, and are assumed less likely to have desirable traits, such as goodness, kindness, and honesty. Three quarters of women consider appearance important to their self image and over a third rank it as the most important factor.Although appearance can be a significant source of pleasure, its price can also be excessive, not only in time and money, but also in physical and psychological health. Our annual global investment in appearance totals close to $200 billion. Many individuals experience stigma, discrimination, and related difficulties, such as eating disorders, depression, and risky dieting and cosmetic procedures. Women bear a vastly disproportionate share of these costs, in part because they face standards more exacting than those for men, and pay greater penalties for falling short. The Beauty Bias explores the social, biological, market, and media forces that have contributed to appearance-related problems, as well as feminism's difficulties in confronting them. The book also reviews why it matters. Appearance-related bias infringes fundamental rights, compromises merit principles, reinforces debilitating stereotypes, and compounds the disadvantages of race, class, and gender. Yet only one state and a half dozen localities explicitly prohibit such discrimination. The Beauty Bias provides the first systematic survey of how appearance laws work in practice, and a compelling argument for extending their reach. The book offers case histories of invidious discrimination and a plausible legal and political strategy for addressing them. Our prejudices run deep, but we can do far more to promote realistic and healthy images of attractiveness, and to reduce the price of their pursuit.

Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, this book takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooing to the wealth of grave goods found in the Upper Paleolithic burials and body painting of the Nuba, we see that there is no one who does not adorn themselves, their possessions, or their environment. But what messages do these adornments send? Drawing on aesthetics, evolutionary history, archaeology, ethology, anthropology, psychology, cultural history, and gender studies, Stephen Davies brings together African, Australian and North and South American indigenous cultures and unites them around the theme of adornment. He shows us that adorning is one of the few social behaviors that is close to being genuinely universal, more typical and extensive than the high-minded activities we prefer to think of as marking our species - religion, morality, and art. Each chapter shows how modes of decoration send vitally important signals about what we care about, our affiliations and backgrounds, our social status and values. In short, by using the theme of bodily adornment to unify a very diverse set of human practices, this book tells us about who we are.

American women today are faced with a paradox: they uphold an ideal of beauty--long, lean, toned--that increasingly bears little resemblance to truth about their size. Women around the world are spending more time, money, and energy pursuing this ideal than ever before. So why does the "perfect body" remain so elusive? And why does the definition of "ideal" vary so widely between countries and cultures? The World Has Curves is journalist Julia Savacool's attempt to answer these questions. She takes readers on a world tour--from China, where the plastic surgery industry is booming; to South Africa, where a heavier shape signals health in a country ravaged by disease; to Afghanistan, where the burka once again reigns supreme. Through extensive reporting and intimate interviews, she offers readers an understanding of how body ideals--in America and abroad--have come to be inextricably linked to the economics of a culture and the impact of globalization. From news programs to reality shows, from prime time comedy to national advertising campaigns, the topic of women's bodies and our collective judgment of the perfect shape is ever-present. This engaging narrative is newsworthy and provocative and will advance our cultural conversation.

A provocative and thoroughly researched inquiry into what we find beautiful and why, skewering the myth that the pursuit of beauty is a learned behavior.  In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism--it's in our biology.  Beauty, she explains, is an essential and ineradicable part of human nature that is revered and ferociously pursued in nearly every civilization--and for good reason. Those features to which we are most attracted are often signals of fertility and fecundity. When seen in the context of a Darwinian struggle for survival, our sometimes extreme attempts to attain beauty--both to become beautiful ourselves and to acquire an attractive partner--suddenly become much more understandable. Moreover, if we understand how the desire for beauty is innate, then we can begin to work in our own interests, and not just the interests of our genetic tendencies.

In this book, the authors present current research in the study of the gender differences, sociocultural influences and health implications of body image. Topics include muscle dysmorphia as an expression of cultural and social standard influence; a cross-national examination of body image and health behaviors in Jordan and the United States; body image and sexuality in breast cancer survivors; body dissatisfaction among African American, Asian American, and Latina women; mens' body image; eating and body-related disorders among men; mass media's effect on body image and eating disturbances; transferring personal body knowledge in adolescents; body image investment and self-regulation of weight control behaviors; explicit and implicit anti-fat attitudes; feminism and body image; dietary habits, exercise and body image; gender difference modulation in a body-selective region in the brain; body image improvement after cosmetic surgery by evaluating postural changes; body image and quality of life of women with polycystic ovary syndrome; and evaluation of ideal and acceptable body shapes in older adults.