Book Review: Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan suffered psychosis and hallucination and was hospitalized by a mystery disease for several weeks until Dr. Souhel Najjar of New York University Langone Medical Center diagnosed her of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an autoimmune disease caused by antibody B-cell attack neurons in brain.

Susannah is lucky to have two parents who don't give up on her and keep pushing for answer and seeking medical treatment for their daughter.

Book Review: How to Change Your Mind What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

Some keywords to ponder after hearing the audio book:

1. psychedelic
2. psyilocybin
3. Being rather than doing
4. LSD
5. 5-MeO-DMT
6. Default Mode Network (DMN)
7. Burning Man
8. Mushroom
9. Mediatation
10. Left brain vs Right brain
11. Ayahausca

The Glossary section of the book is the most valuable as it contains a lot of terms, organizations and concepts of the psychedelic movement, and best of all Amazon website for the book offers this gem of the book for free.

Book Review: Mind Fixers, Psychiatry's troubled search for the biology of mental illness by Anne Harrington

The author is Harvard history professor, and the book documented psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. The conundrum of psychiatry is that it tried to define itself as a branch of medical science but failed to find much biological explanation for most of ailment it tried to help: schizophrenia, depression and bipolar depression. And most of drugs psychiatrist relied on today are found decades earlier, and due to awareness of placebo effects and patient's awareness of severe side effect, drug companies seems to lost interest in developing new drugs for psychiatry.
The root cause for the stalling of psychiatry today is the lack of breakthrough in understanding in biomedical terms of mental illness.