Christopher Lane Op-Ed in the LA TIMES

Wrangling Over Psychiatry's Bible
Christopher Lane
LA Times, November 16, 2008

Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal’s normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America’s psychiatric bible, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Assn. and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences. Published by the American Psychiatric Assn. (and better known as the DSM), the manual is meant to cover every mental health disorder that affects children and adults.

Not only do mental health professionals use it routinely when treating patients, but the DSM is also a bible of sorts for insurance companies deciding what disorders to cover, as well as for clinicians, courts, prisons, pharmaceutical companies and agencies that regulate drugs. Because large numbers of countries, including the United States, treat the DSM as gospel, it’s no exaggeration to say that minor changes and additions have powerful ripple effects on mental health diagnoses around the world.

Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, is the author of “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.”

To read the full commentary, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE in the New York Review

Trapped in the New 'You're On Your Own' World
Robert M. Solow
The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008

When the Bush-Cheney administration proposed to replace Social Security with a system of individually accumulated, individually owned, and individually invested accounts, my first thought was that its goal was to take the Social out of Social Security. It took a few minutes longer to realize that it also intended to take the Security out of Social Security.

That attempt failed. In recent years, however, a mixture of public and private policy decisions and impersonal market developments has had the broad effect of shifting many financial risks from established institutions, including even society at large, to individuals who are unable to cope with them in an adequate way. Information may be impossibly difficult for citizens to process; or else the basic information may not be available to individuals or private groups. Sometimes the scale of the possible bad outcomes may be overwhelming. Sometimes the appropriate insurance market cannot function or just does not exist. The result is that individuals and families can be the casualties of situations that once would have been handled by a more centralized and more bearable allocation of risks.

The current turmoil in credit markets and the recession that is sure to follow are likely to drive this trend further. Banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions have seen too many risks go sour. They will be more determined than ever to push further risks onto those needy borrowers who are too weak and too ignorant to bargain hard. Families, small businesses, and other borrowers of last resort will be under great pressure.

Peter Gosselin's excellent and thoughtful book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families, is not the first to explore this territory. Two others that come to mind are Louis Uchitelle's The Disposable American and Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift. Gosselin is like Uchitelle in combining social criticism with substantial stories of recognizable people who have been trapped by bad luck or bad judgment in this new you're-on-your-own world; he differs in covering a much broader variety of risks and risk-bearers than Uchitelle's focus on workers and job-related risks. Hacker's book also ranges over many issues, but does not have Gosselin's expert journalistic use of recognizable cases. (Professor Hacker is currently engaged in a Rockefeller Foundation–sponsored effort to construct a general "Index of Economic Security"—to show empirically how economic security varies over time and across social groups.)

Gosselin, who works in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, does a fine job of connecting the stories he tells to general ideas and to economy- wide statistical markers, some developed for his particular purpose. He has produced a readable and valuable book...

To read the full review, click here.

Ruth Butler's HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER in The Wilson Quarterly

Married to the Muse
Kate Christensen
The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2008

The library of art history is rife with biographies of The ­Artist—­whomever he might ­be—­as a young, ­middle-­aged, old, and immortal man. But rarely does a book deal primarily with the woman he painted over and over, the ordin­ary ­model-­wife whose face an artist immortalized in paint or bronze. Rarer still is the book that focuses on three such women and reveals them as biographical subjects in their own ­right.

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master is Ruth Butler’s masterfully researched examination of the lives of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuret, the three women who mod­eled for, bore sons to, lived in poverty with, and eventually married three of the towering artistic geniuses of their time: Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin, respec­tively. All were ordinary girls plucked from the streets of Paris by their future husbands, ­hand­picked, apparently, with an eye toward muse­dom. Though they figure prominently in their husbands’ paintings and sculptures, beyond these evocations of their changing expressions, modes of dress, settings, and periods of life, little of substance was known about any of them before ­now.

Butler argues convincingly that her subjects are impor­tant to the history of art, and not for their faces and figures alone. At the turn of the 20th century, traditional artistic subjects, taken from myth, the Bible, and history, were giving way to a more quotidian, social, realistic mode. That Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin chose as their models the women they lived with was a revolutionary shift: The domestic and aes­thetic became connected in an entirely new way. “These women,” Butler writes, “weren’t just models; they brought a whole spectrum of feelings with them, giving their husbands’ art emotional texture and substance, contributing elements for art as im­portant as the light in which a scene is bathed, the space where an object sits, or movements that provide real character in a scene or to a figure.”

To read the full review, click here.

Documentary based on Ronald Florence's THE PERFECT MACHINE to air on PBS

"The Journey to Palomar," a documentary based on Florence's book The Perfect Machine (HarperCollins), will be broadcast nationally on PBS stations on Monday, November 10, 2008 at 10 pm. Be sure to check your local PBS station listings! To view a trailer, visit www.JourneyToPalomar.org.

BU Panelists Debate the Future of Publishing

The theme for the afternoon session of BU's conference on non-fiction book publishing was the impact of the digital revolution. Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs Books, championed newer technologies that faciliate smart inventorying and distribution, which prompted a spirited discussion with Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, and Wendy Strothman on the current state and direction of publishing. For an excerpt of the day's discussions, click here.

James Galbraith discusses THE PREDATOR STATE with The New York Times Magazine

The Populist
Deborah Solomon
The New York Times Magazine, October 31

The progressive economist talks about why economics is useless, why Henry Paulson’s bailout fell short and how the Bush administration replaced free markets with a “predator state.”

To read the interview, click here.