Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Dangerous to Your Mental Health by William Glasser, MD

Americans are notoriously overmedicated, and in no area is this more true than mental health. Millions of Americans spend billions of dollars a year on prescriptions to control relatively mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, symptoms that could be cured--not just controlled, cured--if people would take the time to see how they are choosing their symptoms. So goes the argument in Warning, and to be sure, the words “choosing” and “symptoms” in the same sentence can provoke skepticism, if not outright hostility, from many therapy clients. But Glasser spells out the underlying theory clearly and unaggressively, through the vehicle of a (fictionalized) series of Choice Theory “Focus Groups” where an assortment of symptom-bearers all look for relief. Warning is highly readable, if scientifically lightweight, and concludes with a pair of powerful (and not fictionalized) articles by other authors, each describing their encounters with modern psychiatry. You may be best served to start there.

Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson

Neuroscientists are a heady lot (no pun intended). They tend to write in dense, uninteresting ways. Luckily for us all, Steven Johnson is not a neuroscientist. He is a writer, one who has made a very successful career out of taking dense scientific knowledge and transforming it into something dramatic, emotional, and important. In Mind Wide Open, Johnson goes through brain scans to try to make himself more creative, plays video games with the goal of improving his attention span, and walks us through the biology of emotions by connecting it all to a window crashing in on his home. If you want to know how the mind works on a neurological level without having to trudge through a textbook, this paperback will remind you what it is like to enjoy learning.

Mean Genes by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan

Infidelity, gossip, debt, materialism, road rage: Each of these problems appears at first to be a diversion from our natures, a modern problem resulting from modern life. Not so, say the researchers behind Mean Genes, who argue compellingly that each of these and many more of the common difficulties we encounter can be traced to our genetic roots. Concise and loaded with fascinating examples, Mean Genes is a great read. In spite of its subtitle, however (“From sex to money to food: Taming our primal instincts”), it is largely deterministic, arguing that these problems are indeed imprinted on us genetically and may be inevitable. It offers only token lip service on how these problems can be solved. As a therapist, I tend to side more with the free will crowd.

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The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

Boys in America do significantly worse in school than do girls. Boys are now outnumberd by girls in college enrollment and in graduate education, even in many fields once dominated by males. Boys remain much more likely than girls to engage in violence and drug use throughout childhood and adolescence. Yet we don’t hear about a crisis among boys in this country. We do hear about a crisis among girls, that they need saving, that their self-esteem is, collectively, at a dangerously low level. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence for this, but surprisingly little science backing it up. In fact, most research indicates that girls are receiving more support and feeling and doing better than they have in decades. In The War Against Boys, Sommers delives boatloads of science--most of it from Europe--that shows boys may be in much more of a crisis, and that programs to help them work, if only anyone would take the time to notice them. While we hear often in the US of the success of girls in single-gender math classes, for example, rarely do we hear that boys in Europe do much better in single-gender classes in a variety of subjects. The War Against Boys is thorough and detailed, and I was fully prepared to dismiss its arguments as an addition to the “everyone’s a victim” collection. Then, at halftime of a professional soccer game, I watched as a local team of 9-year-old boys played a short exhibition against a local team of 9-year-old girls. Developmentally, the girls were farther along then the boys, as is typical of the age: the girls were significantly taller and better coordinated. When the girls scored, the crowd appropriately voiced its strong approval. When the boys scored, the crowd booed--evidently for no reason other than their maleness.

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How to Know God by Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra has a penchant for bringing ideas of various religions together with science to create a model of consumable spirituality. Here he leans heavily toward the “consumable” part, peppering an otherwise solid text with lists (“Seven Stages of God”) and outlines that take more away from his direction than they add to it. Chopra is a master of the spiritual, and there is a great deal of insight to this book. The fact that it reads more like a series of magazine articles may put it at the top of many a reading list. It may also leave you with questions unanswered.

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The 30 Secrets of Happily Married Couples by Paul Coleman

Published in 1992, this collection and the research it is based on are both now a bit dated. However, the truths couples will find within have stood the test of time. Coleman effectively takes the best research on couples available at that point and breaks it down into easy-to-understand secrets, each one by itself enough to revitalize a failing relationship. The clear language and real-world examples of what happens to couples who don’t know these secrets make this book a must for any couple looking to improve how they relate to one another. Okay, so they aren’t all really secrets... most anyone you meet on the street could tell you that “Effective Problem Solving” is important to making a relationship last. What makes this collection special are Coleman’s guides on exactly how to put the secrets into practice. Those methods are the real secrets.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman

Through the work of his Seattle "Love Lab," John Gottman has made tremendous strides in what we know about how marriages split up and how they can be saved. The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work takes the lessons learned and puts them in convincing, readable form. The Seven Principles are not speculation or opinion, they are based entirely on physiological research done with couples. With that kind of backing, Gottman is justified in taking a few cheap shots at "Men are from Mars" author John Gray: "The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple's friendship. For men, the determining factor is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple's friendship. So men and women come from the same planet after all."