We recommended 927 books this year — here they are.
For Your Reading List  Credit: Grand Central Publishing, Shannon Taggart The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan Anyone who's been through any kind of psychiatric care has likely also experienced its shortcomings: the subjectivity of diagnoses, the trial and error of treatment, the general dismissal of a person whose symptoms aren't tangible. In The Great Pretender, Susannah Cahalan (who previously delved into her own experience of madness in her memoir Brain on Fire) puts these failures in context — showing how far we've come but also how wrong we're still getting it — through her investigation of one 1973 groundbreaking experiment. With Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan at the helm, a group of eight sane, healthy adults went undercover as patients in psychiatric wards across the country, each claiming to hear voices. The report of their varied experiences, "On Being Sane in Insane Places," was a damning exposé and spurred monumental changes in our understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders and the people who live with them — but Cahalan digs even deeper into the veracity of the study itself. It's a fascinating, potent, and crucial read. Get your copy now. —Arianna Rebolini
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