Lays bare the history behind mind-body healing. People suffering from serious illnesses improve their survival chances by adopting a positive attitude and refusing to believe in the worst. Stress is the great killer of modern life. Ancient Eastern mind-body techniques can bring us balance and healing. We’ve all heard claims like these, and many find them plausible. When it comes to disease and healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter. But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant history describes our commitments to mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories that have allowed people to make new sense of their suffering, express discontent with existing care, and rationalize new treatments and lifestyles. These stories are sometimes supported by science, sometimes quarrel with science, but are all ultimately about much more than just science.

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Harrington, Anne

Alternative Medicine

W.W.Norton&Company

Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here.
In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.
But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time.
Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well.
In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones.
A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

Mental Health

"A splendid history of mind-body medicine...a book that desperately needed to be written." ―Jerome Groopman, New York Times
Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.
But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant cultural history describes mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories, allowing us to make new sense of our suffering and to rationalize new treatments and lifestyles. 36 illustrations

Review\n"By charting our fluctuating beliefs about our own minds, [Anne] Harrington effectively tells a story about the twentieth century itself." 
― Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker\n"Anne Harrington masterfully chronicles the hopes―and the hype―surrounding psychiatry’s much-heralded ‘biological revolution’ in this penetrating, capacious, and immensely engaging account." 
― Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism\n"A compelling story of the ongoing mission to understand and treat our troubled minds." 
― Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe\n"Enthralling.… Harrington takes us on a fascinating tour of the up-and-down history of pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disorders." 
― Alison Abbott, Nature\n"When it comes to doctoring the body, you have to go back to the 19th century to find a time when the theories were baseless… and the treatments often harmful.… For doctoring the mind, as Anne Harrington’s fine history of psychiatry shows, that point is much more recent." 
― Economist\n"Harrington’s grasp of this story and the clarity with which, with limited moralism, she delivers a tale about the ‘big picture’ of psychiatry and neurology is emblematic of the historian’s craft." 
― Stephen T. Casper, Science\n"A lucid and compelling analysis of the travails of psychiatry as it has attempted to ground its understanding of mental illness in biology." 
― Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research\n"The story Harrington tells is one of push-and-pull, back-and-forth.… Intricate and winding, though her prose remains clear and crisp." 
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times\n"Disagreement is central to psychiatry, a fact that resonates throughout Anne Harrington’s masterful history." 
― Philip Alcabes, Los Angeles Review of Books\n"A tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.… Of value to historians of medicine." 
― Gary Greenberg, Atlantic\n“Superb… a nuanced account of biological psychiatry.” ―Richard J. McNally 
In Mind Fixers, “the preeminent historian of neuroscience” (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry’s waxing and waning theories have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.

Their meeting captured headlines; the waiting list for tickets was nearly 2000 names long. If you were unable to attend, this book will take you there. Including both the papers given at the conference, and the animated discussion and debate that followed, The Dalai Lama at MIT reveals scientists and monks reaching across a cultural divide, to share insights, studies, and enduring questions. 
Is there any substance to monks’ claims that meditation can provide astonishing memories for words and images? Is there any neuroscientific evidence that meditation will help you pay attention, think better, control and even eliminate negative emotions? Are Buddhists right to make compassion a fundamental human emotion, and Western scientists wrong to have neglected it? 
The Dalai Lama at MIT shows scientists finding startling support for some Buddhist claims, Buddhists eager to participate in neuroscientific experiments, as well as misunderstandings and laughter. Those in white coats and those in orange robes agree that joining forces could bring new light to the study of human minds.

The Dalai Lama at MIT

Psychology & Counseling

Harvard University Press

By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework.
 Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

Reenchanted Science

History

Princeton University Press

The study concentrates on, without being strictly limited to, the years 1860-1900 and encompasses explorations into the concepts of symmetry and asymmetry in early nineteenth-century neurology.

Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain

Diseases & Physical Ailments

By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

Europe

The description for this book, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought, will be forthcoming.

Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought

Critical Thinking and Writing for Nursing Students (Transforming Nursing Practice Series)

Critical thinking, writing and reflection are core skills that nursing students are expected to develop throughout their studies. This book is a clear and practical guide to help students develop these skills. It explains what critical thinking is and how students should use it throughout their nursing programme. Throughout, the book demonstrates the transferable nature of critical thinking and reflection from academic contexts to the real practice of nursing. The 2nd edition includes a new chapter on critiquing literature, examines how caring skills are essential to critical thinking and includes a website with annotated examples of students′ work.

Medical Books

Price, Bob

Nursing

Learning Matters

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harrington, Anne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Harrington, Anne

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harrington, Anne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

The Dalai Lama at MIT

Reenchanted Science

Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain

Reenchanted Science

Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought

Critical Thinking and Writing for Nursing Students (Transforming Nursing Practice Series)