Paul Bloom can always be counted on to take your confident assumptions about humanity and turn them upside down. This time, his eloquent and erudite investigations ask - and answer - the perennial question of what makes life worth living

An exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity, this captivating book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life

Paul Bloom has a gift for spotting paradoxes in human nature and resolving them with deep, satisfying explanations. This lucid and fascinating book does it again

Clear, rightly sceptical, impossible to dislike

Paul Bloom is a phenomenal psychologist. His research is always thought-provoking, and his writing clear and eloquent

This delightful and wonderfully written book gets to the heart of one of the most important questions in modern thought, illustrating how complex and paradoxical human happiness really is

A fun, thought-provoking and insightful journey into the most curious parts of human pleasure

Provocative, fascinating and insightful - from one of the world's best writers and deepest thinkers about human behaviour

A profound meditation on happiness, family and meaning from one of the best writers we have about the human condition. A joy to read

Forget your favourite motivational speaker for a moment and read this book. Paul Bloom gives you the real scoop on what it takes to live a good life, and it's not what you may think

Wonderfully humane, lucid and entertaining ... a brave and necessary tract for the times

A great, provocative book ... that will legitimately change how you think about the world and your own sense of morality

An immensely engaging - if often dismaying - account of American psychiatry. Scull impressively balances the social reality that constitutes 'mental illness' with the ever-shifting rationales used to explain such unsettling behaviors and emotions and justify the social function of those who manage these elusive ills. Desperate Remedies is an important contribution to our understanding of a fundamental and still-contested aspect of human experience

An important plea for psychiatrists not to be seduced into offering a cure that is worse than the disease...Scull's engaging account of the development of psychiatry and psychiatric treatments since the 19th century shows history repeating itself many times over...The grisly part of Scull's story is not gratuitous. It is the context from which modern drugs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics emerged...Desperate Remedies is a reminder of the tragic and barbarous measures that have often been inflicted on people in the name of curing mental disturbance

A provocative and often persuasive analysis of psychiatry...A must-read for those who have been - or fear they will be - touched by mental illness. If psychiatry is to survive, Scull concludes, psychiatrists must be more candid about the limits of their knowledge

Scull is well aware that psychiatry has vacillated between treating 'the mind' with therapeutic dialogue and treating 'the body' with surgery and psychotropic drugs...The medical discipline has never known and still does not know what it is treating. Scull directs the reader's attention to the fact that after decades of research and billions of dollars spent, not a single biomarker for psychiatric sickness has been discovered

An intensely skeptical history and analysis of psychiatry. The gist of his argument is: although there have been undeniable advancements, mental illness remains baffling, and no discipline has done a great job of treating symptoms and understanding causes. Scull has written the best kind of 'feel-bad' book, lashing offenders left and right with his whip of evidence

For me the greatest value of Desperate Remedies is the brilliant spotlight that Scull shines on historical and current truths about psychiatry. There is an implicit plea that is interwoven throughout the book for a measure of relief from the 'devastating tragedy' that envelops people with mental illness. Medical students intending to train in psychiatry would be well served by the masterful perspective Scull provides and the penetrating questions he raises for the profession

Scull delivers a remarkable history of psychiatry. The final section is a devastatingly effective chronicle of the rise of psychopharmacology and its tendency to regard all mental illnesses as potentially treatable with the right medication. This sweeping and comprehensive survey is an impressive feat

A carefully researched history of psychiatry, it provides a critical assessment of the psychiatric enterprise. In the rush to find cures for psychiatric illnesses, Scull believes that there has been a disappointing lack of focus on patients

A compelling argument for why we should be doing less and doing it better... This comforting, calm book is filled with sensible, practical ideas

Burkeman offers practical solutions to problems that might otherwise seem too monolithic to disassemble

Oliver Burkeman's Guardian feature was called "This Column Will Change Your Life". The wisdom of this book could do the same

[A] brilliant, comforting time-management guide

Kind of cool