PositiveThe Washington PostIn her informative and detailed new book, Blue Dreams, Lauren Slater traces the meandering, mercurial history of psychiatric drug discovery, from Thorazine to deep brain stimulation, with a couple of forays into psychedelics ... The most moving and ultimately most compelling parts of Blue Dreams are those where Slater recounts her harrowing history of drug treatment for bipolar illness ... In details both lyrical and crushingly painful, Slater describes her lifelong struggle with what Winston Churchill called the black dog of depression ... Where the book occasionally stumbles is in Slater’s description — perhaps more like wishful thinking — of advances in the physiological understanding of mental illness ... At its best, Blue Dreams is a raw and honest memoir, and frankly one of the few that shows the truly dark side of medication — even as that medication saves lives.
Luke Dittrich
RaveThe Washington PostIn prose both elegant and intimate, and often thrilling, Patient H.M. is an important book about the wages not of sin but of science. It is deeply reported and surprisingly emotional, at times poignant, at others shocking ... Patient H.M. is a scintillating book, infused with humanity.
