Archives de catégorie : Psychology

THE UNMAKING de Stephanie Foo

In this science-based, remarkably candid account of what it’s like to heal from Complex PTSD, journalist Stephanie Foo offers a fascinating exploration of a psychological phenomenon we’re only beginning to understand and a relevant and powerful narrative of reckoning and healing.

THE UNMAKING
by Stephanie Foo
Ballantine, pub. date TBD

Stephanie Foo was an accomplished journalist, a producer at This American Life, won an Emmy, and launched a podcasting app, but behind her office door she was having panic attacks. At the age of 30 she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. Finding few resources to help her heal, Stephanie set out to write her own guide, THE UNMAKING. With the determination and curiosity of an award-winning journalist, Stephanie investigates the science behind Complex PTSD and how it has shaped her own life. She interviews experts and tries a variety of therapies. She also dives into her past of extreme child abuse and neglect and uncovers family secrets.
While someone can develop PTSD from a single traumatic event, Complex PTSD blooms when the trauma happens over and over and over, over the course of years. Risk factors include being hit or verbally abused by a caretaker, having mentally ill, alcoholic or addict parents, or even facing poverty. Those numbers alone add up to around 50 million people. And that’s not including the large populations of those who may have developed Complex PTSD through domestic abuse, continual health issues, or POC and queer people living in threatening and discriminatory environments. They need help. And yet…nobody is talking about it. THE UNMAKING describes how C-PTSD is, essentially, brain damage, and the tragic impact it has on bodies and minds. But unlike the academic books on C-PTSD, Stephanie Foo also shares how it feels to learn that science as a survivor. She writes about her doubts, anguish, terrible setbacks, and ultimately, successes.

Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer. She most recently was a producer at the radio show This American Life, which reaches 5 million listeners every week. Before that, she helped create the public radio show Snap Judgment, where she produced nearly 200 stories in 4 years. Foo is an acclaimed advocate for diversity in all forms. She wrote a viral article for Transom about the importance of diverse workplaces, particularly in newsrooms, and speaks frequently on the topic of diversity and inclusion. She’s an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University and has spoken at Columbia, Vassar, Yale, Berkeley and CUNY.

DIE AUFGEREGTE GESELLSCHAFT de Philipp Hübl

                                                    Applied philosophy with some surprising eye-openers

                                                                       DIE AUFGEREGTE GESELLSCHAFT
                                                                                 by Philipp Hübl
                                                                                                      Blessing, publication Mars 2019

If you are a more conservative kind of person you are more likely to prefer dogs, while the progressive go for cats. And people driven by anger and rage seem to feel nothing but disgust. These are not simply clichés but reveal the core of our morality and are explained by Philipp Hübl in a book packed with amazing philosophical insights.
Research in the fields of psychology and philosophy have shown that emotions are not limited to personal matters but also include the daily news. Philipp Hübl demonstrates how our values and our political views are anchored in our emotional disposition. In other words, emotions influence our moral judgements. We are, however, not helplessly at their mercy; we can overcome them with reason and rational behaviour. With this theory, Hübl is provoking a critical self-examination and at the same time sharpens our view of society.
« The book is particularly interesting because it gives an explanatory approach for the evalutation of political movements in Europe. »

OUTSMARTING THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR de Martha Stout

Hope and concrete solutions for those who are currently dealing with a sociopath

OUTSMARTING THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR: How to Protect Yourself Against a Ruthless Manipulator
by Martha Stout’s
Crown/Harmony Avril 2020

Stout’s 2005 bestseller The Sociopath Next Door (534,000 copies sold to date) showed readers how to identify a sociopath. In this new work, she takes a step further by examining the personal and global implications of sociopathy, providing hope and concrete solutions for those who are currently dealing with a sociopath.Bringing together the countless e-mails, phone calls, and letters that she has collected from readers since the publication of The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout mines these accounts for their inherent instruction and fascination, and makes the issue of conscience, or the lack thereof, riveting and relevant to a wide audience.

Organized around categories such as destructive narcissism, violent sociopaths, sociopathic coworkers, and the sociopath in your family, each chapter contains representative stories from « everyday people, » as well as Stout’s detailed explanation and commentary on how best to react in these situations to keep the sociopath at bay. Uniting these categories is Stout’s discussion of changing psychological theories of personality and sociopathy and the enduring triumph of conscience over those who operate without empathy or concern for others. With Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door, Stout aims to help readers navigate their interactions with the ruthless people in their personal lives and to inform society’s broader interest in character and conceptions of normality.

MARTHA STOUT, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in private practice, served on the faculty in psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for 25 years. She is the author of The Sociopath Next Door and The Myth of Sanity.

THE WAR FOR KINDNESS de Jamil Zaki

A Stanford psychologist offers a bold new understanding of empathy, and shows how we can expand our circle of care, even in these divisive times

THE WAR FOR KINDNESS
Building Empathy in a Fractured World
by Jamil Zaki
Crown, June 2019

Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse.  It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can harness this new mindset to overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles—fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don’t succumb to burnout. Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action. The future may depend on whether we accept the challenge.

Jamil Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.