Name: Clutter
Brand: Jennifer Howard
SKU: 9781953368096
Price: 16.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Jonathan Foiles

This City Is Killing Me

9781948742474

$16.95

Jonathan Foiles weaves together psychology and public policy, exploring the trauma underlying urbanization in a book hailed as “an urgent call for reform” (Kirkus Reviews).

When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between specializing in either mental health or public policy. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. As he counseled poor patients from Chicago’s South and West Sides, he realized individual therapy couldn’t account for all the ways unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and other policy decisions impacted the well-being of both individuals and communities.

Through a series of beautifully written and accessible case studies, Foiles lets us in on the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. He teaches us how he makes diagnoses, explains how therapists before him would analyze his patients, and teaches us about the profound ways that policy decisions contribute to individual suffering.

A remarkable, unique work of medical writing that serves as a call to action, this report by an experienced mental health professional is a must-read for anyone interested in the overlaps between mental health, public policy, and urbanization.

“Foiles follows five current and former patients at Mount Sinai Hospital in Douglas Park as they deal with the demons of urban life. Their stories are engaging . . . but never voyeuristic.” —Chicago Magazine

“Offers an empathetic look at how the pressures of surviving in an urban environment—including unemployment, poverty and violence—make finding help even more difficult and shares a call to action to help heal our communities.” —Chicago Public Library

Cover image for This City Is Killing Me, isbn: 9781948742474

Jennifer Howard

Clutter

9781953368096

$16.95

“I’m sitting on the floor in my mother’s house, surrounded by stuff.”

So begins Jennifer Howard’s Clutter, an expansive assessment of our relationship to the things that share and shape our lives. Sparked by the painful two-year process of cleaning out her mother’s house in the wake of a devastating physical and emotional collapse, Howard sets her own personal struggle with clutter against a meticulously researched history of just how the developed world came to drown in material goods. With sharp prose and an eye for telling detail, she connects the dots between the Industrial Revolution, the Sears & Roebuck catalog, and the Container Store, and shines unsparing light on clutter’s darker connections to environmental devastation and hoarding disorder. In a confounding age when Amazon can deliver anything at the click of a mouse and decluttering guru Marie Kondo can become a reality TV star, Howard’s bracing analysis has never been more timely.

Cover image for Clutter, isbn: 9781953368096

Jonathan Foiles

Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room

9781953368836

$21.95

Anxiety may be the defining feeling of our current era, and though it affects many people on a deeply personal level, the last few years have also witnessed the rise of more communal feelings of dread and unknowing, problems that sometimes seem too big to face. Will the United States remain a democracy? Can we still have meaningful lives amid the rubble of late capitalism and the inevitable creep of climate change? How do we even start to grapple with a problem so large it seems to pervade almost every corner of our lives?

In Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, Jonathan Foiles, a licensed psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, explains how philosophy can help us respond to these deep questions and communal worries about modern life. Read how Søren Kierkegaard can speak to feelings of helplessness in the face of police violence, how Hannah Arendt can help us rethink the seemingly unavoidable problem of a warming planet, and how social advocates like Jane Addams and Dorothy Day can offer hope and resolve in a world that sometimes seems like it’s already ended.

Thoughtful, discerning, personal, and accessible, Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room will serve as a concise companion for anyone looking to address our cultural unease and find new ways to face it together.

Cover image for Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, isbn: 9781953368836

Jonathan Foiles

(Mis)Diagnosed

9781948742993

$16.95

“Fascinating history . . . A passionate and well-informed study on the importance of improving inclusiveness in mental health evaluations.” ―Kirkus Reviews

In a clear, empathetic style, Jonathan Foiles, author of the critically acclaimed This City Is Killing Me, takes us through troubling examples of bias in mental health work. Placing them in context of past blunders in the history of psychiatry and the DSM, he looks closely at questions that lay bare the intersections between mental health care, race, gender, and sexuality:

• Why are women more likely to be labeled borderline personalities?

• Are transgender patients being treated today like gay patients were in the past?

• Has “protest psychosis,” a term used to diagnose Black men during the civil rights era, simply been renamed schizoaffective disorder?

• How different is our current label of “intellectual disability” from the history of eugenics?

• What does it actually mean to be diagnosed with a “mental illness”?

This slim but wide-ranging collection of essays wrestles with these questions and offers potential ways forward in a world where mental health diagnoses can be helpful, but not necessarily absolute. It is a pragmatic and sympathetic guide to how we might craft a better and more just therapeutic future for all people.

Cover image for (Mis)Diagnosed, isbn: 9781948742993

Jennifer Howard

Clutter: An Untidy History

9781948742726

$26.00

“A brilliant and beautiful meditation on the nature of our attachment to things. Reading Clutter made me long for a life without clutter.” —Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times–bestselling author and host of the Revisionist History podcast

“I’m sitting on the floor in my mother’s house, surrounded by stuff.” So begins Jennifer Howard’s Clutter, an expansive assessment of our relationship to the things that share and shape our lives. Sparked by the painful two-year process of cleaning out her mother’s house in the wake of a devastating physical and emotional collapse, Howard sets her own personal struggle with clutter against a meticulously researched history of just how the developed world came to drown in material goods. With sharp prose and an eye for telling detail, she connects the dots between the Industrial Revolution, the Sears & Roebuck catalog, and the Container Store, and shines unsparing light on clutter’s darker connections to environmental devastation and hoarding disorder. In a confounding age when Amazon can deliver anything at the click of a mouse and decluttering guru Marie Kondo can become a reality TV star, Howard’s bracing analysis has never been timelier.

“In her stern and wide-ranging new manifesto, Clutter: An Untidy History, journalist Jennifer Howard takes the anti-clutter message a step further. Howard argues that decluttering is not just a personally liberating ritual, but a moral imperative, a duty we owe both to our children and to the planet.” —Jennifer Reese, The Washington Post

“Blending her personal experience and her research, Howard creates an engaging narrative that is colored by her investment in understanding hoarding in all of its complexities.” —Linda Levitt, PopMatters