Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump
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"Unravel[s] the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment." — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
A landmark book, from "one of the world's most prominent psychiatrists" (The Atlantic): Allen Frances analyzes the nation, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress that must be understood if we are to move forward. Equally challenging and profound, Twilight of American Sanity "joins a small shelf of essential titles—Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is another—that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened" (Kirkus).
It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one-off, an exception—not a reflection on us or our democracy. But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul. ... What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind's future? Trump is a symptom of a world in distress, not its sole cause. Blaming him for all our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent. Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society—if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn't crazy, but our society is. —from TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY
More than three years in the making: the world's leading expert on psychiatric diagnosis, past leader of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM ("the bible of psychology"), and author of the influential international bestseller on the medicalization of ordinary life, Saving Normal, draws upon his vast experience to deliver a powerful critique of modern American society's collective slide away from sanity and offers an urgently needed prescription for reclaiming our bearings. Widely cited in recent months as the man who quite literally wrote the diagnostic criteria for narcissism, Allen Frances, M.D., has been at the center of the debate surrounding President Trump's mental state—quoted in Evan Osnos's May 2017 New Yorker article ("How Trump Could Get Fired") and publishing a much-shared opinion letter in the New York Times ("An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump's Mental State"). Frances argues that Trump is "bad, not mad"—and that the real question to wrestle with is how we as a country could have chosen him as our leader. Twilight of American Sanity is an essential work for understanding our national crisis.
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Allen Frances. (2017). Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Allen Frances. 2017. Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Allen Frances, Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. HarperCollins, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Allen Frances. Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. HarperCollins, 2017.
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Allen Frances, MD, is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Frances was the chairman of the DSM-IV Task Force and a member of the leadership group for DSM-III and DSM-III-R. He is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Saving Normal and the reference work Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis. He lives in San Diego, California.
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"Unravel[s] the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment." — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
A landmark book, from "one of the world's most prominent psychiatrists" (The Atlantic): Allen Frances analyzes the nation, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress that must be understood if we are to move forward. Equally challenging and profound, Twilight of American Sanity "joins a small shelf of essential titles—Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is another—that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened" (Kirkus).
It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one-off, an exception—not a reflection on us or our democracy. But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul. ... What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind's future? Trump is a symptom of a world in distress, not its sole cause. Blaming him for all our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent. Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society—if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn't crazy, but our society is. —from TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY
More than three years in the making: the world's leading expert on psychiatric diagnosis, past leader of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM ("the bible of psychology"), and author of the influential international bestseller on the medicalization of ordinary life, Saving Normal, draws upon his vast experience to deliver a powerful critique of modern American society's collective slide away from sanity and offers an urgently needed prescription for reclaiming our bearings. Widely cited in recent months as the man who quite literally wrote the diagnostic criteria for narcissism, Allen Frances, M.D., has been at the center of the debate surrounding President Trump's mental state—quoted in Evan Osnos's May 2017 New Yorker article ("How Trump Could Get Fired") and publishing a much-shared opinion letter in the New York Times ("An Eminent Psychiatrist Demurs on Trump's Mental State"). Frances argues that Trump is "bad, not mad"—and that the real question to wrestle with is how we as a country could have chosen him as our leader. Twilight of American Sanity is an essential work for understanding our national crisis.
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- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "This welcome and insightful book joins a small shelf of essential titles—Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is another—that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened."
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- source: Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of The End of Nature and Free Radio Vermont
- content: "Allen Frances is right: the deep questions are not about Trump but about the society in which he became even a plausible candidate, much less the president. May Twilight of American Sanity be an opportunity to think more clearly about who we are and what we really want!"
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- source: The Atlantic (July/August, 2017)
- content: "One of the world's most prominent psychiatrists."
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- source: Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
- content: "For some mental-health practitioners, the ethical debate [over Trump's mental state] is a distraction from a larger point. In Twilight of American Sanity, Allen Frances argues that the more urgent concern is unravelling the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment."
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- source: New York Times
- content: "An eminent psychiatrist."
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- source: Norman Ornstein, contributing writer, The Atlantic; columnist, National Journal; and resident scholar, the American Enterprise Institute
- content: "Lively, provocative. ... Frances indicts our broader societal insanity for electing Trump and embracing his views, and offers wide-ranging insights into human behavior and the consequences for society and governance."
- premium: False
- source: Sir Simon Wessely, president of the Royal Society of Medicine and Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College, London
- content: "The State of the Nation according to the nation's leading psychiatrist: Allen Frances's Twilight of American Sanity is informed, insightful, illuminating, interesting, occasionally infuriating, but almost always right."
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- source: New York Journal of Books
- content: "Hard-hitting. ... A must-read."
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August 7, 2017
Psychiatrist Frances is unwilling to join fellow mental-health professionals in assigning a diagnosis to Donald Trump. Instead, Frances views the 45th president’s election as reflecting deeper dysfunctions in modern American life. Unfortunately, he cannot stop fulminating against the president, whom he calls “an irremediable creature of Stone Age emotions and medieval beliefs.” Frances offers some good insights about societal delusions, but hurts his overall case with factual mistakes, such as claiming that “the U.S. has the greatest wealth inequality in the world,” and hyperbole, such as stating that the U.S. is “deeply immersed in its most dystopian dark age.” (More so than the Civil War or the Great Depression?) In making recommendations on how to counter Trump, he advocates support for such progressive grassroots groups as MoveOn and for global solutions to environmental problems, but with few or no specifics. Finally, the author doesn’t do himself any favors with hackneyed sentences such as the following: “It has never been easy being human and our current challenges, difficult as they may seem, pale in comparison to the Black Plague or the 30 Years’ War.” Frances clearly has thought long and hard about Trumpism’s many roots, but this attempt to analyze and respond to them never coheres.
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Starred review from August 15, 2017
"Trump isn't crazy, but our society is."In this cogent analysis of "societal insanity," begun before the last presidential election, Frances (Psychiatry and Behavioral Science/Duke Univ.; Saving Normal: Reclaiming the Natural Power, Resilience, and Self-Healing Properties of the Brain, 2013, etc.) explores at length the many societal delusions that have given rise to Trump. The delusions include a false belief in fast, easy solutions to complex problems, such as global warming (God will fix it), guns (they don't kill people; people do), dwindling resources (there will be a high-tech fix), and so on. Exploiting this societal sickness, Trump, a "skilled snake-oil salesman selling quack medicine...won power because he promised quick, phony cures for the...real problems burdening the significant segment of our population left out of the American dream." Regarding Rust Belt jobs, writes the author, "most of the jobs were lost to automation, not globalization, and sadly they will never return." In the election campaign, Trump, a lifelong con man, displayed the common touch, while Hillary Clinton proved "remote and inaccessible, assuming she could rest comfortably on her long lead and past laurels." Frances makes no secret of his deep abhorrence of Trump: "we have placed the future of humanity in the hands of someone indifferent to facts, proud of scientific ignorance, and ready to act deceitfully on whim and spite." While Trump "doesn't qualify for a mental disorder...he does present with one of the world's best documented cases of lifelong failure to mature." He is "a distillation, mouthpiece, and terrifying living embodiment of all the worst in human nature and societal delusion." In his final, discursive chapters, Frances envisions the possibility of a rational post-Trump world informed by progressive populism. This welcome and insightful book joins a small shelf of essential titles--Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is another--that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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"Unravel[s] the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment." — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
A landmark book, from "one of the world's most prominent psychiatrists" (The Atlantic): Allen Frances analyzes the nation, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress that must be understood if we are to move forward. Equally challenging and profound, Twilight of American Sanity "joins a small shelf of essential titles—Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is another—that help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened" (Kirkus).
It is comforting to see President Donald Trump as a crazy man, a one-off, an exception—not a reflection on us or our democracy. But in ways I never anticipated, his rise was absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul. ... What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind's...
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