Blue Dreams
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Narrated by:
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Betsy Foldes Meiman
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By:
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Lauren Slater
About this listen
A groundbreaking and revelatory history of our major psychotropic drugs, from "a thoroughly exhilarating and entertaining writer." (Washington Post).
Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly 70 years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don't know exactly how or why these drugs work - or don't work - on what ails our brains. Blue Dreams offers the explosive story of the discovery, invention, people, and science behind our licensed narcotics, as told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own intimate experience with the highs and lows of psychiatry's drugs. Lauren Slater's account ranges from the earliest, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other antidepressants, as well as Ecstasy, "magic mushrooms", the most cutting-edge memory drugs, and even neural implants. Along the way, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself, illuminating the imprint its colorful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and demonstrating how these wonder drugs may heal us or hurt us.
©2018 Lauren Slater (P)2018 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Weaving together the history of psychopharmacology and her personal experience as a patient, Slater offers readers a candid and compelling glimpse at life on psychiatric drugs and the science behind them . . . Intriguing and instructive." (Booklist)
"Smart, charming, iconoclastic, and inquisitive." (Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac)
"Slater is more poet than narrator, more philosopher than psychologist, more artist than doctor.... Every page brims with beautifully rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states." (San Francisco Chronicle)
"Betsy Foldes-Meiman's clear, down-to-earth narration complements the author's personal approach to her subject... The well-paced narration aids the listener in following the myriad historical events and scientific details." (AudioFile)
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America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world.
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He is a reporter...
- By Briana on 05-07-18
By: Ethan Watters
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The Brain That Changes Itself
- Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
- By: Norman Doidge M.D.
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, MD, traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformed - people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable.
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***MIND BLOWN***
- By Laura Elsasser on 04-04-21
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A Nation in Pain
- Healing Our Biggest Health Problem
- By: Judy Foreman
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Published in partnership with the International Association for the Study of Pain, A Nation in Pain offers a sweeping, deeply researched account of the chronic pain crisis, from neurobiology to public policy, and presents practical solutions that are within our grasp today. Drawing on both her personal experience with chronic pain and her background as an award-winning health journalist, she guides us through recent scientific discoveries, including genetic susceptibility to pain.
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Broad but superficial.
- By J. P. Murphy on 07-03-15
By: Judy Foreman
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Asleep
- The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
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Scary, and still unsolved, medical mystery
- By joyce on 12-14-14
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Heart
- A History
- By: Sandeep Jauhar
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As cardiologist and best-selling author Sandeep Jauhar tells in The Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that changed the way we live. Deftly alternating between historical episodes and his own work, Jauhar tells the colorful and little known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ.
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Fascinating Insight
- By Ironcharles on 10-27-18
By: Sandeep Jauhar
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Saving Normal
- An Insider’s Revolt Against out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life
- By: Allen Frances MD
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In Saving Normal, Allen Frances, one of the world's most influential psychiatrists, warns that mislabeling everyday problems as mental illness has shocking implications for individuals and society: Stigmatizing a healthy person as mentally ill leads to unnecessary, harmful medications, the narrowing of horizons, misallocation of medical resources, and draining of the budgets of families and the nation.
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Right on the money
- By Mentecuerpo on 03-29-19
By: Allen Frances MD
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The Undead
- Organ Harvesting, The Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers - How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death
- By: Dick Teresi
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear - and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.
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Eye opening
- By Amy Giglio on 07-01-18
By: Dick Teresi
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The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
- My Tale of Madness and Recovery
- By: Barbara K. Lipska, Elaine McArdle - contributor
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.
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Be Prepared To Feel Insane--
- By Gillian on 04-11-18
By: Barbara K. Lipska, and others
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Doing Harm
- By: Maya Dusenbery
- Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Editor of the award-winning site Feministing.com, Maya Dusenbery brings together scientific and sociological research, interviews with experts within and outside the medical establishment, and personal stories from women across the country to provide the first comprehensive, accessible look at how sexism in medicine harms women today.
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One of the most important books ever written
- By Dresden on 03-18-18
By: Maya Dusenbery
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The Body Keeps the Score
- Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
- By: Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
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Overall Worthwhile, Lingers Too Long in the Why
- By LittleBeadsOfMercury on 04-07-21
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The Heart Healers
- The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives
- By: James Forrester MD
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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At one time heart disease was a death sentence. By the middle of the 20th century, it was killing millions, and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On September 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time.
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Great review of the landmark achievements in Cardiology.
- By Trauma NP on 12-14-15
What listeners say about Blue Dreams
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- DJB
- 01-09-19
Great synopsis of psychiatry
A good listen for anyone who's on medication. The chapters on SSRIs and placebos seems so damning to the profession that I almost want to hear a rebuttal from psychiatrists, or something. Is the monoamine hypothesis basically nonsense?
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- Steven
- 11-13-18
Narrator mispronunciations too distracting
This important book is worth it, but please get a new narrator, the mispronunciations are far too numerous and distracting.
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- Dennis
- 11-15-18
History of Mental Health Relalted Drugs
fascinating book with that certainly raises loads of issues, questions, and many concerns all of which have been and will continue to be debated for many many years to come. the personal anecdotes were occasionally a bit distracting from the overall story but maybe that was just part of the distracting nature of this mental health world.
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- Robert Kittel
- 03-28-18
It's autobiographical & it's incredibly education
I worked in psych for my career. I found this book highly educational and was a great review of psych meds. though I disagree with the author on Timothy Leary politicizing LSD. I believe it was a political assault by Nixion on the counter culture. Otherwise her courage and lose are clear. An getting an education on psycho active drugs is priceless.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Kimberly
- 10-28-18
Pronunciation!!
Please make sure readers know how to pronounce all the words, and please tell editors to step their game to catch the glaring errors. There were several throughout the book, and my ears hurt so much I could barely make it through the Ketamine section.
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6 people found this helpful
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- William
- 02-16-20
Hope for Help
Lauren Slater is both a psychologist and a patient. She writes about the development of the drugs psychiatry has used to treat people with mental illness, spending a chapter on each type beginning with Thorazine in the 1950s, but also interspersing the book with her own personal experience with depression. We know at least the basic causes of most chronic diseases and therefore we can develop drugs that can directly focus on the fundamental problem, blood thinners to reduce the risk of strokes, insulin to treat diabetes, and we can continue to develop drugs following similar strategies to do an even better job while reducing the side effects. But, even though there are many promising theories, no one really knows what causes mental illnesses. We can know that certain areas of the brain do control certain things, but what’s the underlying cause. Some people with chronic depression are helped by drugs that increase serotonin, but some people with high serotonin levels also have chronic depression, and some people with low serotonin levels have no chronic depression.
For decades, mental illness was thought to be caused by external factors, distant parents, clinging parents, fears, traumatic (even minor ones) events in childhood or adulthood. It was not until the mid-20th century that the idea that mental illness could be caused by a chemical imbalance. But, we still don’t have a deep understanding of how that works. So, all the significant drugs for mental illness have come about by accident--in testing another drug for some other illness, they found that it affected a person’s mental state. And, often they must be taken for life, while gradually losing effectiveness over time, thus requiring ever stronger doses while also causing serious side effects that may be shortening the patient’s life significantly.
The author takes a fairly balanced view of the problems and solutions, which I think would be hard to do when you are also a patient. She agrees that mental illness is often due to external factors, often during childhood, though also due to traumatic events as an adult (PTSD, for example), and also is often a chemical imbalance, and even more likely is a combination of both. She believes in talk therapy and also believes in medication, but also thinks that our society often goes too far in one direction or the other and that currently we are too willing to rely on medication. She herself has been dependent on medication for 35 years and is still not confident that she is better because of it, at least when looking at the long term. She says, “Thanks to psychiatry’s drugs, I have a mind that can appreciate the beauty around me, but on the other hand, thanks to psychiatry’s drugs, I am dying faster than you are.” She also spends a bit of time discussing natural ‘drugs’ like lithium (not a chemical composition but a natural element) and “magic mushrooms.” She also looks at the hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and Ketamine that were misused and put under strict control such that they can’t be effectively studied anymore, even though there is evidence that under controlled doses they can help certain mental illnesses to the point that they problem goes away and the drugs can be discontinued. She does push for bringing them back into the research stream and believes that they may become the future of psychiatric medication.
If you’re interested in a deep understanding of mental illness and psychiatric therapy, this book won’t satisfy you, but if you just want to understand it better, it does a pretty good job. Sometimes the transition between the science and history to her own personal history is a bit abrupt, and yet I’d like to have heard more of her personal experiences. She does describe vividly her own breakdowns, lapses into paranoia, and departures from reality. She had been hospitalized five times between the ages of 13 and 24. But, the book begins with her walking through an abandoned mental institution as a reminder of what we used to do with people with mental and psychotic disorders. Everything had been left in place after it closed down. In one room she picked up an old dusty pillow on a bed and found a note under the pillow with one word, “Help.” The book is not really a book of answers, but of some partial answers and lots of questions. But, at least there is now some hope of help.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Laura J
- 06-01-18
Sobering
Lauren Slater was very thorough in her research of the history of mental health treatments. Her reviews of psychotropic drugs have extra meaning, since she is also a "client" who has experienced many of these drugs herself. I work in the mental health field as a counselor so the science of how each drug works in the brain was immensely helpful. I finished the book with more caution about the use of any drug than I was before (hence my review tile), and more open to hallucinogenics for certain cases. Very interesting read.
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65 people found this helpful
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- Leah P.
- 11-07-18
HIGHLY recommend!!
This is a longer book, but I have thoroughly enjoyed it's entirety. The last several chapters are my favorite, or maybe the last half, although the first half very informative and beneficial! I put it on 2x the speed to lessen the time.
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- lolorunnisomo
- 03-16-20
Very informative book
Very informative book and I appreciate the objectivity in which it was written. I also appreciated the mixture of historical information and the author’s personal journey. That said, at times, the language was a bit too flowery for me. Still a very good book!
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- Olga
- 08-24-19
Very interesting and useful book
I listened the book with great interest. The history of development of psychoactive and therapeutic drugs is amazingly fascinating. Author combines historical perspective and personal struggles with mental desease with great skill. I also liked philosophical aspect of the book.
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