PREVIEW
Guests heard on Volume 89
Jerome Wakefield, author of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sadness into Depressive Disorder, on how psychiatry began ignoring causes of mental suffering and so defined sadness as a disease
Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, on the complex characteristics of anxiety and the tendency to treat the absence of ease with drugs
Dan Blazer, author of The Age of Melancholy: “Major Depression” and Its Social Origins, on why psychiatric disorders require attention to the story of patients’ lives
Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, on 1960s dreams of countercultural change and the rise of the Whole Earth Catalog
Barrett Fisher, on the films of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc.)
Thomas Hibbs, author of Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, on the theme of the possibility of redemption in film noir, “neo-noir,” and similar films
Bonus: Jerome Wakefield on the role of drug companies in promoting new assumptions about the nature of mental health, and on the benefits of negative emotions
Click on the tags below for listings of related readings or audio features.