A persuasive and passionate plea from two mental health professionals to ease use of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under their belief that it is leading to an over-diagnosed society. For many health professionals, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is an indispensable resource. As the standard reference book for psychiatrists and psychotherapist everywhere, the DSM has had an inestimable influence on the way medical professionals diagnosis mental disorders in their patients. But with a push to label clients with pathological disorders in order to get reimbursed by insurance companies, the purpose of the DSM is no longer serving as a reference book. Instead, it is acting as a list of things that can qualify a patient’s diagnosis. In Making Us Crazy, Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins evaluate how the DSM has become the influence behind diagnoses that assassinate character and slander the opposition, often for political or monetary gain. By examining how the reference book serves as a source to label every phobia and quirk that arises in a patient, Kirk and Kutchins question the overuse of the DSM by today’s mental health professionals.

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves. For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties. Crazy Like Us documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases. In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug. But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

Strange as it may seem, other people are not nearly as committed to our happiness as we are. In fact, sometimes they seem like they're on a mission to make us miserable! There's always that one person. The one who hijacks your emotions and makes you crazy. The one who seems to thrive on drama. If you could just "fix" that person, everything would be better. But we can't fix other people--we can only make choices about ourselves. In this cut-to-the-chase book, communication expert Mike Bechtle shows readers that they don't have to be victims of other people's craziness. With commonsense wisdom and practical advice that can be implemented immediately, Bechtle gives readers a proven strategy to handle crazy people. More than just offering a set of techniques, Bechtle offers a new perspective that will change readers' lives as they deal with those difficult people who just won't go away.

From the bestselling author of the classic book on ADD, Driven to Distraction, a memoir of the strange upbringing that shaped Dr. Edward M. Hallowell's celebrated career. When Edward M. Hallowell was eleven, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, alcoholic mother, abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behavior from those around him, and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control. The voice turned out to be right. Now, decades later, Hallowell is a leading expert on attention disorders and the author of twenty books, including Driven to Distraction, the work that introduced ADD to the world. In Because I Come from a Crazy Family, he tells the often strange story of a childhood marked by what he calls the "WASP triad" of alcoholism, mental illness, and politeness, and explores the wild wish, surging beneath his incredible ambition, that he could have saved his own family of drunk, crazy, and well-intentioned eccentrics, and himself. Because I Come from a Crazy Family is an affecting, at times harrowing, ultimately moving memoir about crazy families and where they can lead, about being called to the mental health profession, and about the unending joys and challenges that come with helping people celebrate who they are. A portion of the author's proceeds of this book will go to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).

“A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness…Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken.”—Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son—in the throes of a manic episode—broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless thousands who suffer confinement instead of care, brutal conditions instead of treatment, in the “revolving doors” between hospital and jail. With mass deinstitutionalization, large numbers of state mental patients are homeless or in jail-an experience little better than the horrors of a century ago. Earley takes us directly into that experience—and into that of a father and award-winning journalist trying to fight for a better way.

In this shocking expose of the process by which the mental-health elite judge us all, Caplan demonstrates that much of what is labeled "mental illness" would be more appropriately called "problems in living". She also points out the flaws in using the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental-Health Disorders) to decide who is truly mentally ill.

"If there's one thing I know, it's crazy. A lot of people have called me crazy. Crazy Kristen! For a while there, it was practically my name. Women all over the world get called crazy every day. But we weren't born crazy—we were made crazy." Unpacking the ups and downs of Kristen's laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes cringe-worthy dating history, He's Making You Crazy will hold your hand through deep self-reflection—while giving you that push to put on your detective's hat and hack your man's email account if you need to. From trapping your boyfriend in ridiculous lies to gathering all your crush's security question answers on the first date, Kristen shares her no-holds-barred, hysterically funny, and hard-earned advice on men, love, and modern dating. He's Making You Crazy will give you the motivation you need to get out of an unhealthy relationship (the one that's making you crazy!), the wisdom to step up and admit when you're the one in the wrong, and the courage to keep your heart open through it all.