Lauren Slater

Traces developments in human psychology over the course of the twentieth century, beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of the child raised in a box.

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

A woman suffering from a complex brain disorder that causes her to lie compulsively takes readers inside her mind to explore the complexities of a constantly restless and deceived consciousness. Reprint.

A Metaphorical Memoir

Lying

A start-to-finish narrative history of our major psychotropic drugs, from "a thoroughly exhilarating and entertaining writer" (Washington Post). As our approach to mental illness has oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, one in five Americans now takes a psychotropic drug, yet seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don't really know exactly how or why they work--or don't work--on what ails our brains. In Blue Dreams, Lauren Slater offers an explosive account not just of the science but of the people--inventors, adherents, detractors, and consumers-behind our licensed narcotics, from the earliest, Thorazine and Lithium, up through Prozac, Ecstasy, "magic mushrooms," the most cutting-edge memory drugs, and neural implants. In so doing, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself and illuminates the signature its colorful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and how these wonder drugs may heal or hurt us.

The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

Blue Dreams

Stephanie Knowles

A collection of original fairy tales for adults explores contemporary family dynamics, moral conundrums, and romantic love, as well as the role of stories in providing healing and illumination.

Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas

Blue Beyond Blue

Lauren Slater, a brilliant writer who is a young therapist, takes us on a mesmerizing personal and professional journey in this remarkable memoir about her work with mental and emotional illness. The territory of the mind and of madness can seem a foreign, even frightening place-until you read Welcome to My Country. Writing in a powerful and original voice, Lauren Slater closes the distance between "us" and "them," transporting us into the country of Lenny, Moxi, Oscar, and Marie. She lets us watch as she interacts with and strives to understand patients suffering from mental and emotional distress-the schizophrenic, the depressed, the suicidal. As the young psychologist responds to, reflects on, and re-creates her interactions with the inner realities of the dispossessed, she moves us to a deeper understanding of the complexities of the human mind and spirit. And then, in a stunning final chapter, the psychologist confronts herself, when she is asked to treat a young woman, bulimic and suicidal, who is on the same ward where Slater herself was once such a patient. Like An Unquiet Mind, Listening to Prozac and Girl, Interrupted, Welcome to My Country is a beautifully written, captivating, and revealing book, an unusual personal and professional memoir that brings us closer to understanding ourselves, one another, and the human condition.

A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

Welcome to My Country

Provides a look inside the world of the schizophrenic, the suicidal, and other troubled individuals, in a personal study that chronicles the author's work with patients suffering from mental and emotional distress

Prozac Diary

Cutia lui Skinner. Mari experimente psihologice ale secolului XX

A stunning new book about the role of animals in our lives, by a popular and acclaimed writer From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of sleeping cows and a “Private Way” full of the wondrous and creepy creatures of the wild—spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes—Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from her troubled life. As she matures, her attraction to animals strengthens and grows more complex and compelling even as her family is falling to pieces around her. Slater spends a summer at horse camp, where she witnesses the alternating horrific and loving behavior of her instructor toward the animals in her charge and comes to question the bond that so often develops between females and their equines. Slater’s questions follow her to a foster family, her own parents no longer able to care for her. A pet raccoon, rescued from a hole in the wall, teaches her how to feel at home away from home. The two Shiba Inu puppies Slater adopts years later, against her husband’s will, grow increasingly important to her as she ages and her family begins to grow. Slater’s husband is a born skeptic and possesses a sternly scientific view of animals as unconscious, primitive creatures, one who insists “that an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility.” As one of her dogs, Lila, goes blind and the medical bills and monthly expenses begin to pour in, he calculates the financial burden of their canine family member and finds that Lila has cost them about $60,000, not to mention the approximately 400 pounds of feces she has deposited in their yard. But when Benjamin begins to suffer from chronic pain, Lauren is convinced it is Lila’s resilience and the dog’s quick adaptation to her blindness that draws her husband out of his own misery and motivates him to try to adjust to his situation. Ben never becomes a true believer or a die-hard animal lover, but his story and the stories Lauren tells of her own bond with animals convince her that our connections with the furry, the four-legged, the exoskeleton-ed, or the winged may be just as priceless as our human relationships. The $60,000 Dog is Lauren Slater’s intimate manifesto on the unique, invaluable, and often essential contributions animals make to our lives. As a psychologist, a reporter, an amateur naturalist, and above all an enormously gifted writer, she draws us into the stories of her passion for animals that are so much more than pets. She describes her intense love for the animals in her life without apology and argues, finally, that the works of Darwin and other evolutionary biologists prove that, when it comes to worth, animals are equal, and in some senses even superior, to human beings.

My Life with Animals

The $60,000 Dog

The author describes the dramatic impact of Prozac and her struggle to cope with the challenges of "normal life" during a decade on the drug

"Capacious and rigorous . . . Blue Dreams, like all good histories of medicine, reveals healing to be art as much as science." --Parul Sehgal, New York Times "Terrific." --@MichaelPollan "Ambitious...Slater's depictions of madness are terrifying and fascinating." --USA Today "A vivid and thought-provoking synthesis." --Harper's A groundbreaking and revelatory history of 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 seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, not even their creators understand 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 and development of psychiatric medications, as well as the science and the people behind their invention, told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own experience with the highs and lows of psychiatric drugs. Lauren Slater's revelatory account charts psychiatry's journey from its earliest drugs, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other major antidepressants of the present. Blue Dreams also chronicles experimental treatments involving Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, the most cutting-edge memory drugs, placebos, and even neural implants. In her thorough analysis of each treatment, Slater asks three fundamental questions: how was the drug born, how does it work (or fail to work), and what does it reveal about the ailments it is meant to treat? Fearlessly weaving her own intimate experiences into comprehensive and wide-ranging research, Slater narrates a personal history of psychiatry itself. In the process, her powerful and groundbreaking exploration casts modern psychiatry's ubiquitous wonder drugs in a new light, revealing their ability to heal us or hurt us, and proving an indispensable resource not only for those with a psychotropic prescription but for anyone who hopes to understand the limits of what we know about the human brain and the possibilities for future treatments.

Career-driven and independent-minded, Lauren Slater charts her progess through the complex months leading up to, and through, motherhood. Never less than candid, she begins with the process of her decision to have a child. The cons list is long and includes 'less time for friends', 'less time for work', 'less money' and 'Prozac (I'm on it)'. The pros had only one entry: 'Learn a new kind of love.' But what will that love look like? As a psychologist herself and also one of the first people to take Prozac, Slater brings in an unusual double point of view to bear on a familiar story. Not only does she chronicle the conflicting advice surroundling the use of Prozac and other antidepressants during pregnancy, but also captures just what the experience of preganancy is like.

Travels Through a Pregnant Year

Love Works Like this

In this remarkable book, the author of "Welcome to My Country" and "Prozac Diary" writes about how people discover what love truly is and make the decision to open their life to a child.

Love Works Like This

"Is even the most clenched heart capable of it?" Lauren Slater asks about love, in this original, eloquent, and illuminating book about how we discover what love truly is. Slater, career-oriented and willfully autonomous, charts her own personal journey and decision-making process, starting with a list of the pros and cons, about having a child. The cons are many, the pros only one: "learning a new kind of love." But what will that love look like? How does one reconcile the needs of the self with the demands of others? How do couples go from the dyad that is a marriage to the triad that is a family? And how can Slater adjust to losing precious control of her own carefully developed life? Slater's complex biological and psychological history also lies at the core of this unique and yet strikingly universal story. One of the first people ever to take Prozac, she chronicles the impossibly conflicting advice regarding pregnancy and antidepressants, and explains the rationale behind her eventual decision to stop taking the medication during her first trimester. This is Slater's first encounter with self-sacrifice, and for her a crossroad at which modern medicine and basic human love meet. Love Works Like This is a richly written book by "an enormously poetic and ebullient writer" (Elle magazine), an author who writes with "beauty and bravery" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) about falling in love, about growing into the ability to put someone else's life ahead of your own, and about the rich rewards we can draw from the courage to exchange one kind of happy life for another.

Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family. Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious institution called “family.” She asks difficult questions and probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness. She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she saw him catch fire in a chemical accident. It’s not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.

Notes of a Reluctant Mother

Playing House

Scrisă într-un stil colocvial și antrenant, cu personaje și intrigă, și aducând o notă personală atractivă, cartea ne invită în lumea psihologiei experimentale, locul în care se demonstrează riguros cum funcționează mintea umană și creierul. Slater consideră cele zece experimente psihologice alese drept cele mai importante și interesante din secolul XX. Printre ele, experimentele lui Skinner privind behaviorismul și legenda copilului crescut într-o cutie, experimentul lui Stanley Milgram, care ne arată cât de ușor influențabili suntem când vine vorba despre figurile autoritare, experimentul lui David Rosenham din 1972, legat de validitatea diagnosticului psihiatric, în care opt persoane au simulat diferite afecțiuni mentale pentru a fi internați, experimentele lui Harry Harlow privind maimuțele și maternitatea, experimentele lui Darley și Latané, care au demonstrat ce se întâmplă când, într-un grup de criză, nu există nici o figură autoritară care să preia conducerea, sau experimentele lui Leon Festinger privind disonanța cognitivă. Experimentele, prezentate narativ, ridică întrebări profunde despre medicină, liber-arbitru, supunere față de figuri autoritare și ce este sau nu este etic când vine vorba despre a face experimente asupra ființelor dotate cu conștiință.

Mari experimente psihologice ale secolului XX

Cutia lui Skinner

Through ten examples of ingenious experiments by some of psychology's most innovative thinkers, Lauren Slater traces the evolution of the century's most pressing concerns—free will, authoritarianism, conformity, and morality. Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.

The world of the schizophrenic, the depressed, the suicidal can seem a foreign, frightening place. Now, a brilliant writer/psychologist takes readers on a mesmerizing journey into this enigmatic world. As readers interact through Slater with patients Lenny, Moxi, Oscar, and Marie, they come to understand more about the human mind and spirit. First serial to Harper's.

Robert Atwan

Compiles the best literary essays of the year originally published in American periodicals

Lauren Slater

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