- Hardcover: 331 pages
- Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (30 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0826413153
- ISBN-13: 978-0826413154
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 3.1 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 614,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Review
"It is always refreshing to find someone who stands at the edge of his profession and dissects its failures with a critical eye, refusing to be deceived by its pretensions. Bruce Levine condemns the cold, technocratic approach to mental health and, to our benefit, looks for deeper solutions."
Product Description
In recent years the mental health industry has been attacked for the invalidity of its illnesses, the unreliability of its diagnoses, the dangers of its treatments, and its corruption by drug companies. Commonsense Rebellion integrates those critiques and goes further. Nearly 1 in 4 Americans adults are on psychiatric drugs, and Ritalin production has increased 800 percent since 1990, yet the mental health industry laments the fact that two-thirds of us with diagnosable mental disorders do not seek treatment. This book argues that "institutional mental health's" ever-increasing diseases, disorders, and drugs have diverted us from examining an important rebellion. This rebellion - mainly passive and too often self-destructive - is against an increasingly impersonal and coercive "institutional society." Institutional society's worship of speed, power, and technology has created fantastic wealth - at least for some of us - but its disregard for human autonomy, community, and diversity has come with a cost. Depression has reportedly increased tenfold since 1900, and suicide levels for teenage boys have tripled since 1960. Have human genetics and serotonin levels changed that much, or has society?
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3 reviews
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Excellent.
4 Jan 2003
Format:Hardcover
Great book for independent thinkers and informed citizens. If no one in your immediate vicinity validates that you know what you know, see what you see, and feel what you feel (and you're right!), get this book. There's someone out there who gets it.
The author doesn't recommend magic pills, or therapy or a 12 step group because you've been taking some other pills to get through the days. He doesn't tell you to make gratitude lists or go to college AGAIN or do anything else conformist and profitable for someone else. He reaffirms your intelligence, validates your perceptions, and your right to speak about them, and reassures you it's your highest calling to be yourself. That is what you can do for your country, your family and your sanity.
I gave four instead of five stars because much of the book doesn't apply to me and I found my attention wandering during those chapters. I'm sure parents and teachers will find them invaluable. If you're trying to raise or educate an intelligent, compassionate human being instead of trying to control or manage a future consumer / worker drone, this is the book for you.
Also highly recommended for those who considered careers in psychiatry or social work and found themselves ethically compromised and repulsed. The book is a long overdue critique of the psychiatry / psychology industry that, unlike some others, is balanced and intelligent enough not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This book should be on the shelves in the stores, but I had to order it here. It's worth the wait.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Commonsense Rebellion
21 Oct 2007
Format:Hardcover
If you don't think that your life is being managed by others, for their benefit, you need to read this book! Commonsense Rebellion is an excellent and important critique of our institutional culture and explains in clear detail how our involvement with those institutions actually deprives us of our autonomy, individual power and joy. I see myself as informed and very cynical about the intentions of government, corporations, the media and "educational" institutions, and yet Bruce Levine was able to completely surprise me with things I didn't know. It would be a service to everyone if this book were required reading for all high school and college students. One of the most wonderful things about the book is that at the end of each chapter Dr. Levine offers suggestions as to what each of us can do to get our lives back.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Empowering lessons in true perspective.
5 April 2008
Format:Paperback
Bruce E. Levine has the credentials that he himself says are proof of compliance. All the same, for those of you who need to know that an author is thus entitled, it may aid you in pulling yourself together to understand some of this. It is time to stop taking all those dangerous psychopharmica. It is time to drink only for a bit of loosening up, but not to handle these bourgeois blues. It is time to understand that we are the other people you are the other people to. The statistics are here in this book, served up for your easy digestion of them. This book just makes me a happier person. Can you dig it?
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