Bestselling author Stout offers a groundbreaking clinical and practical examination of how terror and fear politics affect the biology of the brain. She assures readers that they can interrupt the cycle of trauma and look forward to a future free of fear only by understanding their own paranoia.

On September 11, 2001, the "Fear Switch" in our brains got flicked. How do we turn it off and reclaim our lives? Five years after September 11, we're still scared. And why not? Terrorists could strike at any moment. Our country is at war. The polar caps are melting. Hurricanes loom. We struggle to control our fear so that we can go about our daily lives. Our national consciousness has been torqued by trauma, in the process transforming our behavior, our expectations, our legal system. In The Myth of Sanity, Martha Stout, who until recently taught at the Harvard Medical School, analyzed how we cope with personal trauma. In her national bestseller The Sociopath Next Door, she showed how to avoid suffering psychological damage at the hands of others. Now, in The Paranoia Switch, she offers a groundbreaking clinical, neuropsychological, and practical examination of what terror and fear politics have done to our minds, and to the very biology of our brains. In this timely and essential book, Stout assures us that we can interrupt the cycle of trauma and look forward to a future free of fear only by understanding our own paranoia—and what flips the paranoia switch.

Why does a gifted psychiatrist suddenly begin to torment his own beloved wife? How can a ninety-pound woman carry a massive air conditioner to the second floor of her home, install it in a window unassisted, and then not remember how it got there? Why would a brilliant feminist law student ask her fiancé to treat her like a helpless little girl? How can an ordinary, violence-fearing businessman once have been a gun-packing vigilante prowling the crime districts for a fight? A startling new study in human consciousness, The Myth of Sanity is a landmark book about forgotten trauma, dissociated mental states, and multiple personality in everyday life. In its groundbreaking analysis of childhood trauma and dissociation and their far-reaching implications in adult life, it reveals that moderate dissociation is a normal mental reaction to pain and that even the most extreme dissociative reaction-multiple personality-is more common than we think. Through astonishing stories of people whose lives have been shattered by trauma and then remade, The Myth of Sanity shows us how to recognize these altered mental states in friends and family, even in ourselves.

Exclusionary notions of American national identity have been endemic since the country’s founding. Since the Culture Wars, they have returned with vengeance. One of their champions is a new generation of tech savvy activists known as the Alt-Right. This is a movement that embraces a vision of America that is unapologetically white and Christian supremacist, misogynistic and xenophobic. Rather than see the Alt-Right as an outlier, the authors of this book treat it as an integral part of an endemic battler over the articulation of American national identity. Critically, what distinguishes these cyber warriors from other far-right movements is their rhetorical style. Their far-right counterparts employ muscular rhetoric and demand the right to dominate. The Alt-Right, on the other hand, has opted for a weapons-of-the-weak strategy and accuses adversaries of persecuting them. Embracing a cult of victimhood, this shift in rhetorical tactic is not only a matter of gaslighting; its goal is to justify potential acts of violence.

For more than 30 years Jenkins has been advising the military, government, and prestigious think tanks on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Now he goes beyond what the experts know to examine how terrorists themselves think about such weapons.

When they are sent to Cuba to help care for hurricane survivors, Katie McCloud and her husband Dr. Alex Peters are plunged into a world of espionage that puts them on opposing sides, which threatens their bond to each other.