I’m a psychiatry professor, researcher, and author at Stanford University. Besides OCD, my research has focused on the interface between technology and psychology, both in its negative manifestations (e.g., video game addiction, online narcissism, cyberbullying) and positive applications (e.g., telemedicine, virtual reality therapy, AI digital therapeutics). My reading tastes and non-scientific writing topics reflect the same interests—deep and highly personal psychological explorations of individuals on a quest for meaning or facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles, symptoms, or character tests.
I wrote...
A Leader's Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference
A psychiatrist puts leadership “on the couch,” with a provocative exploration of its crucial, often ignored, psychological and personal character foundations. This distinctive exploration of leadership explains how our cultlike obsession with leadership gives narcissists and sociopaths an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look—and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs leaves many with an inferiority complex.
Aboujaoude’s takedown of the leadership industrial complex pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold—a waste of time and money, Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, how leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that cannot be easily controlled, no matter how gifted the executive coach.
It is unfortunately routine for a thirty-five-year-old neurosurgeon to encounter the death of a patient from an aggressive brain tumor, but it is utterly unexpected for him to have to confront it in the mirror after being diagnosed with disseminated lung cancer himself at an impossibly young age.
Written on borrowed time and in the shadow of his impending demise, this memoir is a profound reflection on life, loss, the meaning of things, and what really matters in the end.
'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal
What makes life worth living in the face of death?
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and…
What happens when a master of externalized psychological profiles turns his attention inward?
I found this to be a restless account of his journey through medicine, addiction, love, and his own inner brain’s workings. This book proves that Sacks’ ultimate and most interesting subject may have been the man himself.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “wonderful memoir” (Los Angeles Times) about a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer, a man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human. • “Intimate.... Brim[s] with life and affection.” —The New York Times
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks writes about the passions that have driven his life—from motorcycles and weight lifting to neurology and poetry. He writes about…
I loved the thrilling interweaving of historical fact with creative fiction, psychology with politics, and high Golden Age Amsterdam culture with Nazi Germany depravity.
Irv Yalom reimagines the inner lives of two men who couldn’t be more different, and whose individual and unique fates history still somehow found a way to unite.
A haunting portrait of Arthur Rosenberg, one of Nazism's chief architects, and his obsession with one of history's most influential Jewish thinkers
In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom spins fact and fiction into an unforgettable psycho-philosophical drama. Yalom tells the story of the seventeenth-century thinker Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy led to his own excommunication from the Jewish community, alongside that of the rise and fall of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who two hundred years later during World War II ordered his task force to plunder Spinoza's ancient library in an effort to deal with the Nazis' "Spinoza Problem."
This book parlays the author’s personal experience with bipolar disorder and mental illness and her experience as a clinician treating these conditions to describe the sometimes clinical roots of genius.
How "artistic temperament," as expressed in literature, music, and the visual arts, differs from the euphoric highs and desperate lows of full-blown psychiatric conditions is the very worthwhile question she passionately tries to answer with and for us.
The anguished and volatile intensity associated with the artistic temperament was once thought to be a symptom of genius or eccentricity peculiar to artists, writers and musicians. Kay Jamison's work, based on her study as a clinical psychologist and researcher in mood disorders, reveals that many artists subject to exalted highs and despairing lows were in fact engaged in a struggle with clinically identifiable manic-depressive illness. Jamison presents proof of the biological foundations of this disease and applies what is known about the illness to the lives and works of some of the world's greatest artists including Byron, Van Gogh,…
How-to books are typically far from my favorites. They are often reductive and play fast and loose with psychology–pretending, for example, that personality traits are easily moldable—so I typically stay away.
Still, it was hard to resist the uplifting pull of a book that turns courage into a set of seemingly teachable and achievable skills, ultimately encouraging people to break through their inhibitions and step up and lead.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.
Don’t miss the five-part HBO Max docuseries Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart!
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG
Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and…
Neuroscience PhD student Frankie Conner has finally gotten her life together—she’s determined to discover the cause of her depression and find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But the first day of her program, she meets a group of talking animals who have an urgent message they refuse to share. And while the animals may not have Frankie’s exalted human brain, they know things she doesn’t, like what happened before she was adopted.
To prove she’s sane, Frankie investigates her forgotten past and conducts clandestine experiments. But just when she uncovers the truth, she has to make an impossible choice: betray the animals she’s fallen in love with—or give up her last chance at success and everything she thought she knew.
Frankie Conner, first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, is finally getting her life together. After multiple failures and several false starts, she's found her calling: become a neuroscientist, discover the cause of her depression and anxiety, and hopefully find a cure for herself and everyone like her.
But her first day of the program, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals who claim to have an urgent message for her. The problem is, they're not willing to share it. Not yet. Not until she's ready.
While Frankie's new friends may not have her highly evolved, state-of-the-art, exalted human brain,…
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