Leader writes of Western Culture’s current failures to define and treat madness. Western nations currently aim to treat the symptoms of psychosis and to bring the patient’s behaviors into line with social norms without understanding or treating the roots of the disease.

Many “symptoms” of psychosis, Leader argues, are actually not symptoms of the underlying disease but adaptations the patient makes to try to adjust their understanding of the world to how the world actually works. The disorders listed in the DSM and the symptoms that define each disorder seem to be defined by the pharmaceutical companies that have a drug to treat each symptom.

A Shining Affliction is Annie G. Rogers’ account of the mutual healing that occurred between her, acting as a therapist, and a five-year-old boy named Ben, who had been terribly neglected as a child. Ben is untrusting, frequently unmanageable, and often violent. His clinical record notes that after the death of his biological mother, while he was still an infant, he was given to a foster family. His foster parents kept him locked in a windowless room for the first eighteen months of his life, ignoring his cries and depriving him of affection and even the most basic contact. Is it any wonder the kid has trouble relating to others? Or that he acts out in violent, antisocial ways?

The Courage to Be Disliked is an introduction to Adlerian psychology in the form of a Socratic dialog. A young man who feels stuck and is unhappy with himself seeks the counsel of an older philosopher. He wants to know how he can find happiness and meaning in world where he never seems to measure up to the expectations of himself or others, a world in which the paths forward seem to both limited and uninviting and may lead to a life he ultimately doesn’t even want.

Martian Time-Slip, published in 1964, takes place on Mars in the late 1990s. The United Nations has begun colonizing the red planet, “reclaiming” desert to serve as farmland and establishing settlements along the great canals. Water is scarce, as are fine foods and luxury goods. Most people subsist on water rations and whatever meager crops they can raise.

Jack Bohlen is a repairman flying from job to job in his Yee Company helicopter. He’s much in demand on a planet where new equipment is hard to get and old equipment must be kept running as long as possible. He can fix just about anything, from industrial refrigeration systems to encrypted cassette recorders to the animatronic teachers at the local public school.

Scott Peck’s People of the Lie proposes that psychology should begin a formal scientific study of evil, and that evil should be added as a diagnosis in American psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Peck mentions along the way that when he made this suggestion to an audience of psychologists and theologians, both sides disagreed with him. Though this book is full of interesting ideas and valuable observations, I agree with Peck’s audience.

Dr. Eger gives a powerful and harrowing account of her youth, of being taken from her home in Hungary, herded into the cattle cars, separated from her parents at Auschwitz. She and her sister survived more than a year in the death camp, and for months more on the death marches that followed before an American GI lifted her from a pile of corpses. Hope and remembrance of the good in life sustained her through unspeakable horrors.

After the war, she came to the US and eventually became a psychologist, helping others through hardship and trauma. Her message is simple, though it’s a hard one for many people to realize, and requires vigilance and effort in practice. We don’t always have a choice about what happens to us, but we do always have a choice about how we respond.

The Body Keeps the Score describes what Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk has seen and learned in his thirty-plus years of treating trauma survivors. The author describes the causes and manifestations of trauma in a number of patients from his clinical practice: abused children, combat veterans, victims of accidents, rape, and assault. He describes how the intense emotional impact of trauma can linger for years when the mind is unable to assimilate the unbearable terror of events.