From the author of the provocative and influential Glow Kids, this is revolutionary research that reveals technology’s damaging effect on mental illness and suicide rates—and offers a way out.
DIGITAL MADNESS:
How Big Tech Is Driving Our Mental Health Pandemic—and the Ancient Prescription for Sanity
by Nicholas Kardaras
St. Martin’s Press, September 2022
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is at the forefront of researchers sounding the alarm about the impact of excessive technology on younger brains. In Glow Kids, he described what screen time does to children, calling it “digital heroin”. Now, in DIGITAL MADNESS, Dr. Kardaras turns his attention to our teens and young adults.
For them, the digital world is a bubble of content you’re meant to “like” or “dislike.” Two choices might be considered easy, but just how detrimental is this binary thinking to mental health? From body image to politics to personal relationships to decisions, the world doesn’t exist in an “up or down,” “black or white,” “good or bad” dynamic, and social media shouldn’t either. DIGITAL MADNESS explores how technology promotes sedentary isolation, polarization, rewards extremes on both sides, and has spawned a mental health and suicide pandemic from which enormous corporations profit.
Dr. Kardaras offers a path out of our crisis, using examples from classical philosophy that encourage resilience, critical thinking, concentration, and other beneficial habits of mind. DIGITAL MADNESS is a crucial book for parents, educators, therapists, public health professionals, and policy makers who are searching for ways to restore our young people’s mental and physical health.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is one of the country’s foremost addiction experts. He was a professor at Stony Brook Medicine and has developed clinical treatment programs all over the country. He is the founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Maui Recovery in Hawaii, Omega Recovery in Austin and the Launch House in New York. He is also a frequent contributor to Psychology Today and FOX News, and has appeared on Good Morning America, ABC’s 20/20, CNN, the CBS Evening News, PBS, NPR and FOX & Friends.
Cancel culture. Chances are you’ve heard about this a lot lately, but what really is it? Blacklisting celebrities? Censorship? Up until this point, this has been the general consensus in the media. But it’s time to raise the bar on our definition—to think of cancel culture less as scandal or suppression and more as an essential means of democratic expression and accountability. THE CASE FOR CANCEL CULTURE offers a fresh progressive lens in favor of cancel culture as a tool for activism and change. It will help readers reflect on and learn the long history of canceling (the Boston Tea Party was cancel culture); how the left and right uniquely equip it as part of their political toolkits; how intersections of society wield it for justice; and ultimately how it levels the playing field for the everyday person’s voice to matter. Why should we care? Because in a world where protest and free speech are being challenged by the most powerful institutions, those without power deserve to understand the nuance and importance of this democratic tool available to them. Rather than seeing cancel culture as a nasty byproduct of the digital age, it should be seen as a powerful instrument for change. Ernest Owens shows readers exactly how with examples from politics, pop culture, and his own personal experience. Readers will walk away from this first-of-its-kind exploration not despising cancel culture but embracing it as a form of democratic expression that’s always been leading the charge in liberating us all.
Twenty-two years ago, Naomi Shaw believed in magic. She and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent that summer roaming the woods of Chester, Washington, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder—the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly, with Cass and Liv stumbling onto the road covered in blood. Naomi had been attacked, was nearly dead. But miraculously, Naomi survived her seventeen stab wounds, and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes. And they were liars. The day she learns that Alan Michael Stahl has died in prison, Naomi gets a call from Olivia. For twenty-two years, the friends have kept a secret worth killing for: a skeleton in the woods that was the center of their rituals and imagined magic that summer. But now Olivia wants to tell, and Naomi is forced back to the town she’d escaped. When Olivia disappears, Naomi sets out to find out what really happened in the woods—no matter how dangerous the truth turns out to be. Naomi thought the Goddess Game was over. But it’s just beginning.
As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob’s tumultuous relationship with Isaac’s mother and the shame he carries from the dissolution of their family. Tragedies that informed Jacob’s role as a father and his reaction to Isaac’s being gay. But most of all, Jacob must share with Isaac the unspoken truths that reside in his heart. He must give voice to the trauma that Isaac has inherited. And he must create a space for the two to find peace. 
Some things are better left forgotten. . . When a woman wakes up with amnesia beside a mountain highway, confused and alone, she fights to regain her identity, only to learn that her parents have disappeared—not long after her mother bought a winning $47 million lottery ticket. As her memories painfully resurface and the police uncover details of her parents’ mysterious disappearance, Cleo Li finds herself under increasing suspicion. Even with the unwavering support of her brother, she can’t quite reconcile her fears with reality or keep the harrowing nightmares at bay. As Cleo delves deeper for the truth, she cannot escape the nagging sense that maybe the person she should be afraid of…is herself.