Twilight of American Sanity, Allen Frances
Twilight of American Sanity, Allen Frances
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Twilight of American Sanity
A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump

Author: Allen Frances

Narrator: Christopher Grove

Unabridged: 12 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/05/2017


Synopsis

“Unravel[s] the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment.” — Evan Osnos, The New YorkerA landmark book, from “one of the world’s most prominent psychiatrists” (The Atlantic): Allen Frances analyzes the nation, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress that must be understood if we are to move forward. Equally challenging and profound, Twilight of American Sanity “joins a small shelf of essential titles—Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land is another—that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened” (Kirkus).It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one-off, an exception—not a reflection on us or our democracy. But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul. … What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind’s future? Trump is a symptom of a world in distress, not its sole cause. Blaming him for all our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent. Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society—if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is. —from TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITYMore than three years in the making: the world's leading expert on psychiatric diagnosis, past leader of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM (“the bible of psychology”), and author of the influential international bestseller on the medicalization of ordinary life, Saving Normal, draws upon his vast experience to deliver a powerful critique of modern American society’s collective slide away from sanity and offers an urgently needed prescription for reclaiming our bearings. Widely cited in recent months as the man who quite literally wrote the diagnostic criteria for narcissism, Allen Frances, M.D., has been at the center of the debate surrounding President Trump’s mental state—quoted in Evan Osnos’s May 2017 New Yorker article (“How Trump Could Get Fired”) and publishing a much-shared opinion letter in the New York Times (“An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump’s Mental State”). Frances argues that Trump is ""bad, not mad""--and that the real question to wrestle with is how we as a country could have chosen him as our leader. Twilight of American Sanity is an essential work for understanding our national crisis.

About Allen Frances

Allen Frances, MD, is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Frances was the chairman of the DSM-IV Task Force and a member of the leadership group for DSM-III and DSM-III-R. He is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Saving Normal and the reference work Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis. He lives in San Diego, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin on November 30, 2017

"When it comes to finding commonsense solutions to concrete problems, we the people are better, wiser, and more united than the politicians who represent us. The platforms of the political parties are drawn up to satisfy the entrenched self-interests of their most rabid members and therefore emphasi......more

Goodreads review by Kathryn on December 17, 2017

Trump's not crazy; we are. That's the premise of this book, and the best part of it was when this psychiatrist explains all the cognitive errors and delusional thinking that got us to the point where the world's greatest democracy elected Donald Trump president. This would be a good book to read if......more

Goodreads review by Sam on October 07, 2017

Addresses the issue with trying to paint Trump as having a clinical mental disorder in the first pages of the book to put that argument to bed as a futile effort that does nothing to help the situation and harms the view of those who are truly battling mental disorders. The Author builds the case of......more

Goodreads review by Friscomama on August 26, 2018

In the prologue, the author explains that the book was started before Trump's election was expected. It covers the mistaken ways in which we Americans seek happiness. I suspect the subtitle about President Trump was put on by the publisher to increase sales, and it probably will. It's mostly a dense......more

Goodreads review by Cgallozzi on September 13, 2017

The book, written by a Psychiatrist - opens with a statement that Donald J. Trump is not "crazy or insane" - but rather speaks about a larger U.S.-wide "Social Delusion" which Trump capitalized upon in his election victory. The Social Delusion includes - denial of the major topics of the day - incom......more