A courageous indictment of the destructive belief that all deviant behavior is a disease, this book offers alternatives to those suffering from additions, and to the professionals seeking to help them. In this plainspoken critique of America's whole approach to addiction, Peele attacks the "addiction as disease" model promoted by AA and NA drug treatment centers.

How parents, teachers, and even professionals are being deceived by the "ADHD Establishment" regarding ADHD and other childhood behavior disorders and the drugs used to treat them. The issue of diagnosing children with behavioral diseases that do not conform to a scientific definition of disease, and then medicating them is a scandal ready to erupt. In The Diseasing of America's Children, popular family psychologist, speaker, and best-selling author John Rosemond joins with pediatrician Dr. Bose Ravenel to uncover the fiction and fallacy behind attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), early-onset biopolar disorder (EOBD), and the drugs prescribed to treat them. Rosemond and Ravenel will: reveal the pseudo-science behind these diagnoses explain how parents, teachers, and even professionals are deceived expose the short- and long-term dangers behavioral drugs pose to children discuss how America's schools are unwittingly feeding the diagnostic beast reveal the simple, common sense truth behind these behavior problems and give parents a practical program for curing these problems without drugs or dependence on professionals

Offers strategies for coping with the stresses and conflicts inherent in caring for elderly parents, discussing the necessity of realizing and accepting the limits of what one can do for sick or failing parents.

Offers an effective if unorthodox approach designed to help parents take aim at the problem of addiction by explaining how to impart the fundamental skills and values that will protect youngsters and keep experimentation from turning into a more dangerous dependency.

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

Despite the lack of medical consensus regarding alcoholism as a disease, many people readily accept the concept of addiction as a clinical as well as a social disorder. An alcoholic is a victim of social circumstance and genetic destiny. Although one might imagine that this dual approach is a reflection of today's enlightened and sympathetic society, historian Sarah Tracy discovers that efforts to medicalize alcoholism are anything but new. Alcoholism in America tells the story of physicians, politicians, court officials, and families struggling to address the danger of excessive alcohol consumption at the turn of the century. Beginning with the formation of the American Association for the Cure of Inebriates in 1870 and concluding with the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, this study examines the effect of the disease concept on individual drinkers and their families and friends, as well as the ongoing battle between policymakers and the professional medical community for jurisdiction over alcohol problems. Tracy captures the complexity of the political, professional, and social negotiations that have characterized the alcoholism field both yesterday and today. Tracy weaves American medical history, social history, and the sociology of knowledge into a narrative that probes the connections among reform movements, social welfare policy, the specialization of medicine, and the social construction of disease. Her insights will engage all those interested in America's historic and current battles with addiction.