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BOOK REVIEW: THE MAN WHO COULDN'T STOP

Thursday 15th May 2014
Submitted by James Lloyd

The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD, And The True Story Of A Life Lost In Thought - David Adam

Early on in this book David Adam claims that most of us have around 4,000 thoughts a day. These mind wanderings are, for the most part, inconsequential: thoughts of what to have for lunch, what to buy, what to do at the weekend. Others are more intrusive. ‘Do I look fat?’ ‘I’m never going to pass that exam.’ ‘People don’t like me.’ These hard-to-shake intrusions are the bread and butter of the whirlwind of negativity that captivates the depressive mind.

But, as illustrated beautifully in this book, nothing tops the insidious and vicious inventiveness of the mind taken over by obsessive-compulsive disorder: OCD. This is the human mind in all its complexity turning in on itself and wreaking havoc, surreptitiously convincing its prey that its obsession is bound to happen.
In David Adam’s case, the obsession was his conviction that he would catch AIDS. He knew it was irrational, he knew it was highly unlikely – but there’s the rub: ‘highly unlikely’ not ‘impossible’. That was the crack through which OCD could squeeze. And so began – in 1991 – an escalating obsession that led to a multitude of compulsions in an equally irrational attempt to quell the disturbing and intrusive thoughts that stormed through his head.
Since his obsession began, he tells us, life went on autopilot. While he was ‘up-front and central’, his mind was now elsewhere. ‘I looked the part and smiled at the passengers, but something else was flying the plane.’ The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is a captivating first-person account of how a blizzard of unwanted thoughts can become a personal nightmare. At times shocking, at times tragic, at times unbelievably funny, it is a wonderful read.
A science writer, Adam has an eye for a good study, bringing even the driest of experiments to life. He takes us on a journey through the history of OCD, providing an up-to-date and accurate account of the current scientific understanding of this devastating condition. As a psychologist, I am familiar with much of the science he discusses. But he describes studies, old and new, in a fresh way, invigorating them with personal tales and haunting anecdotes.
This book will appeal to all those who are fascinated by the human mind and its unending ability to delight and to torment.
Rating: 5/5

Elaine Fox is Professor of Cognitive & Affective Psychology at Oxford University and the author of Rainy Brain Sunny Brain
Read more at Science Focus
http://sciencefocus.com/feature/books/book-review-man-who-couldnt-stop
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Back from the Brink: True Stories & Practical Help for Overcoming Depression & Bipolar Disorder

Learn more
“We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’ ”
~ John Steinbeck
By GRAEME COWAN

Reviewed by MEGAN RIDDLE

For those in the depths of mental illness, there is no lonelier place. It is an incredibly isolating experience; it convinces us that no one could have ever felt this way before. And it is the power of mental illness to make us think it is impossible to ever feel better again.

Layered onto this is the associated shame and denial as we try to hide the condition from friends, loved ones, colleagues at work, the world at large. It can be a very dark place.
In Back from the Brink: True Stories and Practical Help for Overcoming Depression and Bipolar Disorder, mental health advocate and depression survivor Graeme Cowan works to shine a light. For those with depression and bipolar disorder as well as their friends and family, this book can provide both inspiration and practical advice.

Cowan’s book includes an overview of depression and its treatments, extensive interviews with those who have successfully managed their illness, and results from the author’s own survey of more than 4,000 individuals with mood disorders about what has worked for them.

Cowan begins with a review of different types of depression and available treatments, but it is his interviews with public figures that comprise the heart of the book. He includes Q&As with former US Representative Patrick Kennedy (who is also son of the late US Senator Ted Kennedy); Trisha Goddard, a British television talk-show host; Bob Boorstin, the director of public policy at Google; Alastair Campbell, former chief advisor to Tony Blair; and former professional athletes, among others.

What struck me most about those interviewed was their bravery andresilience. When so much of mental illness is shrouded in shame and secrecy, these individuals have chosen to be public about their struggles. This is illustrated clearly, as each chapter begins with a photograph of the person sharing his or her story. They are not hiding. These are people who have struggled tremendously, who now speak candidly about everything from psychosis to suicide attempts — and who have still created for themselves fulfilling and successful lives.

Cowan’s questions cover their childhood, illness, and recovery, as well as how they maintain their wellness now. The diversity of voices enriches the book, each providing a unique perspective for the reader to hear.

Certain themes emerge, including the importance of helping others with their struggles. Patrick Kennedy notes, “I realize I wouldn’t be the person I am today without all of those life experiences. I also realize that in serving others I can be freed from the bondage of self to live a life beyond my wildest dreams.”

Cowan’s own story reflects this as well. He has survived four suicide attempts and five episodes of major depression. He has crawled “back from the brink” many times, and now devotes much of his efforts to mental health advocacy.

In fact, frustrated by the limits of evidence surrounding treatment for mood disorders, Cowan took it upon himself to conduct a survey of over 4,000 “fellow travelers” to try to get a sense of what worked for them. His results emphasize the importance of finding allies among family and friends as well as in a trusted mental health professional. Cowan also gives tips for moving forward, writing, “What I learned after five episodes of major depression…is that taking action is essential to recovery.”

The book provides a fairly balanced perspective as it emphasizes the importance of self-care, overcoming personal inertia, and teaming up with clinicians.

Personally, I found the interviews a bit choppily written — the question-and-answer format could have been better. That said, I was drawn in by the honesty of each person’s responses. Often their answers left me wanting to hear more about their experience.

If you have dealt with depression or bipolar disorder, you’ll likely relate to the stories in this book. You may even find yourself thinking, Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.

After all, none of us is as alone as we thought.
Back from the Brink: True Stories and Practical Help for Overcoming Depression and Bipolar Disorder
New Harbinger Publications, January, 2014Paperback, 232 pages
$16.95
Psych Central's Recommendation: Worth Your Time! +++

Read more at PsychCentral 

http://psychcentral.com/lib/back-from-the-brink-true-stories-practical-help-for-overcoming-depression-bipolar-disorder/00019436
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Left out: the authors who know disability from inside

Last week's recommended reading had a conspicuous, and worrying, absence of personal experience

Temple Grandin
Thursday 11 July 2013 
I was disappointed to read Paul Wilson's top 10 books about disability – what a missed opportunity. One of the slogans of the disability rights movement is "Nothing About Us Without Us" - and there was very little "us" in last week's selection.
Since Aristotle, characters with disabilities have appeared in western drama and impairment has long been used in fiction as a metaphor for mortality, evil, pity – the human condition. However, few of the writers have been disabled themselves, and although I don't believe you have to experience something in order to write about it (I'm a female playwright who writes male characters), a selection that favours books written by non-disabled writers misses far too much.
Many depictions of disabled characters are outdated, incorrect, and far from the reality of living with a physical, sensory, or intellectual impairment. They are invariably rooted in social norms, defining (and often devaluing) the individual according to their medical diagnosis. Apart from the frustration of such limiting characterisation, and inaccuracies being peddled as truth, there is another, more sinister trend – the rising incidence of disability hate crime. Disabled investigative journalist Katherine Quarmby's eye-opening Scapegoat: Why We are Failing Disabled People is a timely study of the root causes of violent crime against people who are "different", a sobering wake-up to western society's ingrained prejudices and our limited definition of what is "normal".
Read the full story at the Guardian 
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Inside The Mind Of A Sociopath


Inside The Mind Of A Sociopath


by NPR STAFF

What exactly is a sociopath? Many people might think of killers, criminals, the cruel and heartless, Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining.

That's the common wisdom. But it's being challenged by a new memoir, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight. It's written under the pen name of M.E. Thomas. The author says most sociopaths are not incarcerated — and the silent majority of them live freely and anonymously. They're your neighbors, colleagues, maybe even family members and lovers.
Thomas admits that sociopaths can be dangerous; they're hungry for power, and they don't feel guilt or remorse. But they're not inherently evil, and some are highly productive members of society. Thomas herself is an attorney, law professor and Sunday school teacher. She founded the website SociopathWorld.com.

Interview Highlights

On the key traits of a sociopath
"They can be very charismatic. They don't really get nervous. ... They tend to fail to conform to social norms. They might come off as a little bit of an independent thinker. Or they might be committing crimes, depending on who they are. They have a facility with lying — well, they lie frequently, obviously to cover up certain aspects of themselves, or things that would indicate that they are a sociopath. Probably the biggest characteristic of a sociopath is their lack of empathy. ... They can't really imagine or feel the emotional worlds of other people. It's very foreign to them. And they don't have conscience."
On whether sociopaths can have fulfilling, loving relationships
"Definitely fulfilling, and I think loving; we feel a love. You know, whatever it is that we feel affection, for me it's maybe 70 percent gratitude, a little bit of adoration, a little bit of — if it's a romantic relationship — infatuation or sexual attraction. I think a complex emotion like love is made up of all sorts of little emotions. And our particular cocktail of love is going to look or feel different to us, but it's still there."
On changing the way we view sociopaths
"I think that there really has been so little research done about sociopaths. And the common wisdom now is that they are untreatable. And that, you know, sociopathy is basically synonymous with evil. ... You know, statistically everybody has interacted with a sociopath at one point. But the fact that most people can't identify who a sociopath is or remember those sorts of interactions suggests to me that it couldn't have been that bad of an interaction, right? Most people interact with sociopaths in positive ways and don't realize it. It's only when we catch them, and they are in prison, and we have gone through this lengthy trial to point out all the bad things that they've done, that we start thinking that sociopaths are bad."
Read the whole interview here
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Darla Burns Of Iowa Wrote A Book With Her Eyes After Becoming Paralyzed With ALS

The Huffington Post  |  Posted:  
Darla Burns wrote an entire book without ever physically typing a word. Burns suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is completely paralyzed. She is unable to move her arms or hands to type, so she wrote a book using her eyes.
Burns used her eyes and a special computer to type by looking at one letter or a short combination of letters at a time. She uses that same computer to speak, just as Stephen Hawking (one of the most famous sufferers of ALS) does. The book was her son's idea, and it took Burns a few months to write it.
The book, a memoir, tells Burns' story of living with ALS for the past 6 years. One reviewer on Amazon calls it "a must read for anyone who wants or needs some insight and understanding of life with ALS."
ALS

Makers: economic manifesto


By  on Wed, Dec 5, 2012

Some months ago, Chris Anderson wrote to me to let me know that he was working on a book called Makers, and given that I'd written a well-known novel on similar themes with the same title, did I mind? Of course I didn't -- for one thing, having already published many stories with the same title as famous stories that came before them, I was hardly in a position to object! But more importantly, I was interested in Anderson's take on the subject.
I've thoroughly enjoyed Anderson's two earlier works on economics in the Internet age (The Long Tail and Free). Anderson -- formerly a tech editor for The Economist -- has got a very good grasp of economics and business; but as the long-time editor-in-chief at Wired, he wasn't afraid of visionary pronouncements about technology either. He's also got a background as an indie rocker, and has a good grasp of the rewards and challenges of a life in the arts. Though I've disagreed pretty vociferously with some of the things he's had to say in the past, his work has provoked more nods from me than head-shakes, and when I've disagreed with him, it's been for chewy, substantive reasons that were worth exploring.
I've just finished a copy of (Anderson's) Makers -- having come to the book a bit late due to my own book-tour for Pirate Cinema -- and it delivered on all the promise of Anderson's earlier work, and then blew past them. Simply put, Makersis a thrilling manifesto, a call to arms to quit your day job, pick up your tools, and change the future of manufacturing and business forever. It's a recipe for a heady cocktail of open business; free software; low-cost, global coordination; and community cooperation that Anderson credibly suggests will forever change the world.
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How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease


 at 11:42 am Mon, Apr 30


Excerpt: Learning from the Octopus: Prologue: Unnatural Disasters
On the morning of December 26, 2004, animals across Asia and Africa were acting strangely. Elephants elicited horrific bellows, herds of oxen bolted for higher ground, and domestic dogs refused to go on their morning walks along the beach. In some cases, bewildered humans followed the lead of their charges to higher ground, but many did not. Less than an hour later, the ocean was sucked back far from shore and a huge tsunami thundered all across India, Africa, and southern Asia, killing 225,000 people -- one of the worst catastrophes in modern history.1
After the floodwaters retreated, international aid poured in, with particular attention paid to installing state-of-the-art tsunami warning systems across the region. Yet in comparison to the animal-based warning systems, these high-tech solutions are still fairly primitive. Just a few years after the tsunami, villagers in the Aceh province of Indonesia, one of the hardest hit areas, angrily stoned their tsunami alarm until it was destroyed. The villagers felt the annoyance of the system's false alarms outweighed its purported benefits in early warning.
Destroying alarm systems that are supposed to protect us isn't uncommon. In the United States, residents of over 21 million households have tampered with, destroyed, or disabled their own smoke detectors because of the nuisance of false alarms.3 In fairness to the makers of smoke and tsunami alarms, such technologies have only been around for a few decades -- a fleeting fraction of Earth's long and violent experience with tsunamis, floods, and fire. By contrast, the surprisingly accurate security systems demonstrated by the animals before the tsunami have been developed and fine-tuned over billions of years, and this illustrates a major point: there is no technological solution that can prepare us for the risks of a highly variable and unpredictable world as well as the ancient natural process of adaptation.
Indeed, just a few weeks before the 2004 tsunami, the most technically sophisticated military force in the world inadvertently and quite publicly demonstrated how poorly adapted it was to its latest challenge. It happened during a pretty standard piece of military propaganda set up for the evening news. The U.S. secretary of defense was to helicopter in to the edge of a war zone to bolster the troops' morale, listen sincerely to their concerns, and assure them that all of America was fighting right there alongside them. But it didn't turn out that way for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Kuwait on December 8, 2004. To the cheers of several thousand soldiers assembled, Specialist Thomas Wilson, a 31-year old Tennessee National Guardsman, pointedly asked the secretary why he and his fellow soldiers were being forced to rummage through garbage dumps to find armor to strap on to their vehicles, which provided inadequate protection in the combat zone. Rumsfeld was initially taken aback, then tartly retorted, "You go to war with the Army you have."4
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Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually



  • BY ROBERT CAPPS
  • 10.19.12
  • 3:00 PM

In the corner of Building 4, a massive complex at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the ghostly skeleton of a pickup truck endures a constant torment. The truck has no wheels, no bed, no seats, and no steering column—it’s just a vacant shell and a set of pedals. Inside, a pneumatic piston is positioned to press on the gas pedal over and over again, night and day. It’s a test of the whole accelerator assembly, but engineers are focused on one simple part—the hinge that connects the gas pedal to the frame.

Building 4 is Ford’s Tough Testing Center, where the company evaluates nearly all of its nonengine parts, from seat belts to axle assemblies. The facility is a monument to a dark truth of manufacturing: Even the best-engineered products fail. Some percentage of all mechanical devices will break before they’re expected to. “Companies come to me and say they want to be 100 percent failure-free after three years,” says Fred Schenkelberg, whose firm, FMS Reliability, estimates the lifespan of products. “But that’s impossible. You can’t do it.”
Consider a few recent examples. In 2009, Mohawk Industries—one of the largest makers of carpeting in the country—was forced to discontinue an entire line of carpet tiles when the tiles failed unexpectedly, costing the company millions. In 2010, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 93,000 artificial hips after their metal joints started failing—inside patients. In 2011, Southwest Airlines grounded 79 planes after one of its Boeing 737s tore open in midflight. And just this past summer, GE issued a recall of 1.3 million dishwashers due to a defective heating element that could cause fires. Unexpected failure happens to everything, and so every manufacturer lives with some amount of risk: the risk of recalls, the risk of outsize warranty claims, the risk that a misbehaving product could hurt or kill a customer.
This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.
Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.
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