Unprotected

Last Saturday I read Unprotected by Anonymous, M.D. It's a short non-fiction book by a woman psychiatrist who works as a counselor at a student health center on a college campus.

While it contained no information I did not already know, I am happy to have all the information neatly contained in one book. The facts are backed with numerous footnotes - the author is very thorough. She organizes her book around the stories of several different patients (or compilations of patients) to illustrate her point that many college students are distressed and depressed because of "the campus culture of permissiveness, experimentation, androgeny, and spiritual bankruptcy."

While the author does not identify herself as Christian, she does call herself religious, and admits that she is a rarity in her profession. She also writes:

Believing in God is good for you. A sense of meaning and purpose benefits mental health. It toughens the skin, and softens the blows of life. To know there is a larger plan, to believe that events are not random, and that you and your behavior matter - this can soothe and heal. To have gratitude and hope, to forgive oneself and others, and to connect with something greater than oneself through prayer and ritual - this is great medicine, maybe even better than Zoloft.

The book is not pretty. It contains explicit material about offensive subjects. For me, it will be a handy tool when conversing about these subjects with those who take the opposite view.