New Books in Psychology

Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New Yor

On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives.  Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mental

The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Nuria Silleras-Fernandez explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages

Stefanie Coché's Psychiatric Institutions and Society: the Practice of Psychiatric Commital in the “Third Reich,” the Democratic Republic of Germany, and the Federal Republic of Germany, 1941-1963 (London: Routledge, 2024; translated by Alex Skinner) probes how the serious and sometimes fatal decision was made to admit

A group of landholding elites waged psychological warfare on the El Salvadoran people, and oppressed them for generations. When a psychologist and Jesuit priest defended the rationality of the people against their oppressors, he paid the ultimate price. This is episode three of Cited’s returning season, The Rationality

Mental health care and its radical possibilities reimagined in the context of its global development under capitalism. The contemporary world is oversaturated with psychiatric programs, methods, and reforms promising to address any number of "crises" in mental health care. When these fail, alternatives to the alternati