Gary Greenberg has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is Manufacturing Depression.
Manufacturing Depression
Summary
Am I happy enough? This has been a pivotal question since America's inception. "Am I not happy enough because I am depressed?" is a more recent version. Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shows how depression has been manufactured - not as an illness but as an idea about our suffering, its source, and its relief. He challenges us to look at depression in a new way. In the 20 years since their introduction, antidepressants have become staples of our medicine chests. Upwards of 30 million Americans are taking them at an annual cost of more than $10 billion. Even more important, Greenberg argues, it has become common, if not mandatory, to think of our unhappiness as a disease that can---and should---be treated by medication. Manufacturing Depression tells the story of how we got to this peculiar point in our history.
©2010 Gary Greenberg (P)2010 Tantor
The Book of Woe
Summary
For more than two years, author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) - the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) compendium of mental illnesses and what Greenberg calls "the book of woe". Since its debut in 1952, the book has been frequently revised, and with each revision, the "official" view on which psychological problems constitute mental illness has changed. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973, and Asperger's gained recognition in 1994 only to see its status challenged nearly 20 years later. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5, the newest iteration, has shaken psychiatry to its foundations. The APA has taken fire from patients, mental health practitioners, and former members for extending the reach of psychiatry into daily life by encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses and prescribe more therapies - often medications whose efficacy is unknown and whose side effects are severe. Critics - including Greenberg - argue that the APA should not have the naming rights to psychological pain or to the hundreds of millions of dollars the organization earns, especially when even the DSM's staunchest defenders acknowledge that the disorders listed in the book are not real illnesses. Greenberg's account of the history behind the DSM, which has grown from pamphlet-sized to encyclopedic since it was first published, and his behind-the-scenes reporting of the deeply flawed process by which the DSM-5 has been revised is both riveting and disturbing. Anyone who has received a diagnosis of mental disorder, filed a claim with an insurer, or just wondered whether daily troubles qualify as true illness should know how the DSM turns suffering into a commodity and the APA into its own biggest beneficiary. Invaluable and informative, The Book of Woe is bound to spark intense debate among expert and casual listeners alike.
©2013 Gary Greenberg (P)2013 Tantor
Scotland
Summary
Reviewing Gary Greenberg's 2013 expose about American psychiatry, the New York Times's Dwight Garner wrote that "Greenberg paces the psychiatric stage as if he were part George Carlin, part Gregory House." But on a spring night in 2013, he found himself pacing the stage of a grade school gym as if he were Hester Prynne. Two registered sex offenders had come to live in the small town Greenberg had called home for thirty years, and his fellow citizens, terrified and enraged, had come out to pin the blame on him. In this riveting memoir about a modern-day witch hunt, Greenberg recounts with his trademark acerbic humor what it is like to be the target of an entire town's wrath. As he describes his Hawthornian moment, he vividly sketches the characters and landscapes that make up a classic New England village and reflects on sex, panic, betrayal, and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible ties that bind communities together.
©2014 Gary Greenberg (P)2016 Audible, Inc.