The Autoimmune Brain: A Five-Step Plan for Treating Chronic Pain, Depression, Anxiety, Fatigue and Attention Disorders

  The Autoimmune Brain: A Five-Step Plan for Treating Chronic Pain, Depression, Anxiety, Fatigue and Attention Disorders 

by David S. Younger

Pages: 288

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

This is not a book that most people will every word or even every page. Younger goes into great detail describing how the brain should work and how people with autoimmune disorder's brains do not work that way. He not only addresses how changes in the immune system affects and changes the brain, but particularly looks at bacterial, viral ,and parasitic infections and just in time for 2020 and its lingering affects -- traumatic stress both physical and emotional. He also tackles how this all works together with genetics as well. As a reader I definitely no longer felt alone with my long list of symptoms, but with my fuzzy brain, I wasn't able to delve into this book the way I would have liked. I plan to return to it and give it another try.  

"Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History's Great Personalities" by Claudia Kalb

This excellent book covers the mental illnesses and/or personality disorders of 12 very famous people:  Marilyn Monroe (borderline personality disorder), Howard Hughes (obsessive-compulsive disorder), Andy Warhol (hoarding), Princess Diana (bulimia), Abraham Lincoln (depression), Christine Jorgenson (transgender), Frank Lloyd Wright (narcissism), Betty Ford (alcoholism/drug addiction), Charles Darwin (anxiety), George Gershwin (hyperactivity), Fyodor Dostoevsky (gambling addiction), and Albert Einstein (Asperger's syndrome).  I love personality theory and found this book to be extremely engrossing and accessible with many sources and notes listed for each person, some of which I can't wait to read for a deeper understanding.  The author is not making diagnoses on her own (she's a journalist and editor) but used these many sources to paint a fascinating and usually compassionate portrait of these well known people.  I found all except the final two figures and their diagnoses to be engrossing, probably because I don't find gambling addiction and Asperger's syndrome to be all that interesting.  However, the fact that all of these people made great contributions to society while trying to deal with sometimes debilitating problems makes their accomplishments all the more remarkable.  (Except for Frank Lloyd Wright - he was just a huge jerk to everyone around him and probably could have achieved even more if not for his extreme narcissism.)  320 pages.

Here's to Not Catching Our Hair on Fire: An Absent-Minded Tale of Life with Giftedness and Attention Deficit - Oh Look! A Chicken by Stacy Turis

The author has written a very funny, and at times, very heart wrenching book about what it is like to live as someone with ADD, and also what it like to live with someone with ADHD, especially if they are also gifted.

She chronicles her journey from self-loathing to self-acceptance, and the twenty-seven businesses she has started (although she can't remember most of them).  This book will help those with ADD see themselves, hopefully accept themselves, and most of all, laugh at themselves.





230 pages