The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches

With an unsparing eye and novelist’s flair for storytelling, New York Times Magazine contributor Bergner (Sing for Your Life) explores “the chasm between physiology and consciousness... between what we’re made of and who we are” in the treatment of mental illness. His brother, Bob, was diagnosed as bipolar as a young adult, institutionalized, and given “major doses” of antipsychotics “that left his hands tremoring.” This story becomes the driver, and source of radical empathy, behind Bergner’s exploration of the limits of Western medicine. Using the stories of Caroline, a roller derby star who hears voices, and David, a civil rights attorney whose withdrawal from antidepressants is exponentially worse than his initial depression, as moving examples to ground his case, a thesis emerges: drugs have been ham-fistedly prescribed to treat mental illnesses, despite minimal efficacy and little regard for serious side effects. As Bergner picks the brains of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and others guided by “the ultimate hope not only of treating our conditions but of understanding our minds,” he sheds light on the long-running tension between biology-driven psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and lucidly examines alternative treatment options, such as therapeutic farms and peer support networks. It all amounts to a compassionate, genre-spanning narrative that calls for less fixing, and more appreciation of and accommodations for many kinds of minds. This will leave readers with much to ponder. (May)