The Mind's Eye:

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money--the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink in Drive. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction--at work, at school, and at home--is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. 

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation--autonomy, mastery, and purpose--and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live. (Publisher's description-Amazon.com)

This is a delightful book about how to motivate people. Pink talks about how real human motivation differs from what society tells us to search for. He discusses Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and points out that the modern worker is well paid enough and stable enough on that hierarchy to begin demanding more from his employer than a steady check. The book explores motivation through empowerment, challenge, meaning and creativity. His metaphors are interesting and easy to follow and the first two sections of the book are succinct and a quick read. The last part of the book is a bit more hodge-podge, but it contains information from the research and tool sand tricks to gain more motivation and success. Some of these seem pointless to me, such as the list of conversation starters and the exercise plan. Overall, I would encourage you to read the first parts and skim the evidence based sections of part three.

Authentic Happiness was a far superior book along the same lines; motivation and meaning come from empowerment, knowing the self and having strong self esteem. This book is quick and interesting and definitely on the edge of the changing ways that we are viewing human motivations and meaning making. It has encouraged me to do more research into the topic.

Before Julie Callahan came to the house at 9 Highland Road in Glen Cove, New York, she had spent a good part of her young life in mental hospitals, her mental and emotional coherence nearly destroyed by a childhood of sexual abuse. Fred Grasso, a schizophrenic, had lived in a filthy single-room occupancy hotel. At 9 Highland Road they and their housemates were given a decent alternative to lives in institutions or in the streets. It was a place in which some even found the chance to get better.

This perfectly observed and passionately imagined book takes us inside one of the supervised group homes that, in an age of shrinking state budgets and psychotropic drugs, have emerged as the backbone of America's mental health system. As it follows the progress and setbacks of residents, their families, and counselors and notes the embittered resistance their presence initially aroused in the neighborhood, 9 Highland Road succeeds in opening the locked world of mental illness. It does so with an empathy and insight that will change forever the way we understand and act in relation to that world. (Publisher's summary- Amazon.com)

Having worked in community mental health, I can honestly say that Winerup's depiction of 9 Highland road is both empathetic and accurate. He explores the politics and struggle to establish new housing as medical hospitals close, and he explores the constant struggle between the government, the staff, and the communities surrounding supportive living programs and group homes such as 9 Highland Road. The book does a wonderful job of casting some light on the extreme stigma that surrounds group homes and supportive living programs. Often these communities are built in well off areas where there are good tax dollars and good hospitals so that the people who are using the mental health services have good supports. This means then that the chronic sufferers of schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder and depression are nose to nose with the upper middle class mainstream. In reading about the reactions of the local community to the group homes, I remembered my own experiences of hurt and saddened residents who had experienced their neighbors as fearful and accusatory. Whenever a new person moved in to the complex where our program was housed, we received calls to the staff office claiming that our residents were weird, dirty, antisocial, or threatening. I asked one woman who called what the resident had done to make her feel threatened. She told me that he made eye contact with her when he was sitting on the stoop smoking, and tried to make conversation, which made her and her daughter uncomfortable. This man was a very nice, shy, soft spoken individual, but since he was part of a “program for crazy people,” his polite overtures were attacking and deranged in this woman's mind.

Winerip's portrayal of the group home also illustrates the long and frustrating cycle of successes and failures that mark the lives of many chronic sufferers of mental illness. His case studies are varied across disorders, family involvement and d support, and outcome. Most importantly, he shows the experience of housemate and staff interactions and how they effect the outcomes for many clients. Good supportive staff is extremely important in community mental health and it is often a thankless job with few rewards and a high volume of stress. This book depicts that clinical experience in all of its joys and challenges. I really enjoyed it and found it to be uplifting and rejuvenating for those days when spending another day coping with the downsides of mental health was too much. Give it a read on a day you need inspiration, or pick it up as a change from technical class readings.

"Sylvia Frumkin," highly intelligent young girl, became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in anti out of mental institutions. Susan Sheehan, a talented reporter followed "Sylvia" for almost a year talking with and observing her listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors, even for a period sleeping in the bed next to her in a mental hospital. (Publisher's Discription- Amazon.com)

Sheehan's depiction of schizophrenia is both accurate and empathetic. She humanizes the diagnosis and makes the real struggles present in the mental health system come alive. Because she followed Sylvia for so long and remained by her side even to the point of sharing her room, Sheehan is able to shed light on the difficulties and political struggles that are part of running facilities as well as highlighting the effects of staff interactions with clients. She does a good job of balancing a view of politics and fund seeking with clinical staff doing the best they can with limited funding. Though institutions as Sylvia knew them are becoming a thing of the past, it is likely that many clients that we see with chronic problems will have experienced a hospitalization of this type somewhere in their history. This book allowed me to get a sense of the inside of these institutions in a way that statistics could not. Because these experiences can be both traumatizing and life saving, it is important to gain some frame of reference for these experiences. I believe that reading this sort of book is one way of broadening my core knowledge and becoming a more well rounded clinician.

As a student I had no idea what the world of long term chronic mental illness was like; diagnostics were largely words on a page and did not have real people with real problems behind them. This book shows delusions as part of a way of thinking for Sylvia. She speaks for herself and shares her world view in detail, sometimes with humor and sometimes with pain. I highly encourage any future practitioners to read this book and books like it. Humanizing what we do while in training can not be over prioritized.

I encourage people to pick up this book and take a look at one person's journey through schizophrenia and through the system. The prose is easy to read and the story moves quickly, like a magazine article. I read it over a single weekend.