While this book was intriguing and has a few good parts, there are numerous problems.
First: The author has some serious issues when it comes to her unWhile this book was intriguing and has a few good parts, there are numerous problems.
First: The author has some serious issues when it comes to her understanding of why people are fat. She claims that people are "obese" primarily due to food addiction, which is not supported by the science. But she just presents that as fact without supporting that claim with ANY scientific evidence, studies, etc. I feel like since she treats addictions for her job, she may just be seeing addiction as the root cause of this phenomenon. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail and so-forth.
Secondly, she apparently has no awareness whatsoever regarding eating disorders. She praises one of her patients for losing a lot of weight, but then when she shares how this patient lost weight, we learn that this patient basically developed an eating disorder! She seems oblivious to this fact. Specifically, the patient has developed disordered eating strategies in order to ignore his hunger. We know that this level of weight loss is not sustainable in the long term (usually) and when eating disorders are sustained, they can be deadly! In general she thinks that being fat is an indication that a person has an addiction (false!) and that the best way to treat this addiction is with disordered eating! She is absolutely clueless.
Next, at one point she casually offers up the suggestion that people cover themselves up to prevent sex addiction! No evidence that this will work at all, no science. She pulls straight from purity-culture and rape-culture, which we know is so harmful, especially to women/girls who then view themselves as objects to be covered up rather than people with their own agency and inherent value. And again, I expected something scientific rather than the old purity-culture toxicity.
Finally: I listened to the audiobook, which the author herself reads, and it was SO CRINGEWORTHY when she tried to mispronounce words and mess up English grammar exactly the same way her patients do. She has a few patients who are from other countries, and when she tells their stories from their perspective, she mispronounces a lot of words, including the word penis, which is hugely distracting. I respect that people pronounce things differently and that's fine, but there was no value from her trying to recreate how they speak for her book. It was weird and distracting, and it added nothing of value to the stories she was telling.
Looking around here at the other review for Dopamine Nation on goodreads, it is clear that I'm not the only one who thinks this book is a mixed-bag! I've never encountered a book quite this strange.
Other than these MAJOR issues, the book was interesting to read, and it seems like this author is a good psychiatrist, but man, I was frankly shocked by the diet-culture/ disordered-eating / purity-culture / rape-culture BS contained in this book. I expected far better from a book that's supposed to be scientific. Hence my 2 star review....more
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