Sign-In
Cart
Psychiatry Hexagrams: Understanding Modern Psychiatry Through Lessons of the Ancient I Ching
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 254
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What happens when a psychiatrist uses an ancient system of Chinese philosophy to illuminate the paradoxes of modern mental health care?
Psychiatry Hexagrams is a strikingly original work of clinical insight, philosophical investigation, and cultural critique-organized not by diagnosis or specialty, but by the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, each a lens for examining the strange, fractured landscape of contemporary psychiatry.
Across sixty-four intricately crafted chapters, board-certified psychiatrist Jason Yanofski explores themes that most clinical texts avoid: the distortion of human subjectivity by documentation systems; the diagnostic loop between symptom and label; the ethical complexity of involuntary care; the quiet violence of overmedication; the bureaucratization of empathy; and the question-posed quietly and persistently-of what it really means to help. From courtrooms to locked wards, clinical supervision to street outreach, the book traverses the spaces where psychiatry meets philosophy, language, ethics, trauma, and power.
Drawing on Taoist metaphors, cognitive science, forensic psychiatry, systems theory, and moments of piercing human detail, each chapter stands alone as a meditation on a particular pattern: not just patterns of behavior, but patterns of institutional dysfunction, narrative collapse, moral dissonance, and unexpected recovery. The I Ching hexagrams are not used here as decoration or metaphor-but as structural and conceptual anchors. They give form to what resists classification. They allow the book to be read in any order. They hold tension without resolving it.
This is not a self-help manual, a clinical handbook, or a philosophical treatise-yet it contains the qualities of all three. It is a book written for those who inhabit the world of mental health care from any angle: clinicians, patients, students, critics, educators, skeptics, survivors. It is a book for those who have wondered why psychiatry feels both necessary and impossible, compassionate and coercive, scientific and surreal. And it is for those who have tried to hold onto their humanity inside a system that often seems engineered to wear it down.
At once lyrical and incisive, rigorous and darkly funny, Psychiatry Hexagrams offers no easy answers. Instead, it offers a structure-recursive, symbolic, generative-for thinking more clearly, speaking more carefully, and staying human in the presence of suffering.
It is, above all, a book about pattern: how it forms, how it distorts, how it heals, and how it sometimes speaks back.
Also in
Humor
I Can't Believe I Did That: The Game That Gives You Points for Sharing Awkward, Awesome, and Unforgettable Memories: Card Games
Nadelberg, David
Katcher, Neil
Other
The Science Magpie: Fascinating Facts, Stories, Poems, Diagrams and Jokes Plucked from Science
Flynn, Simon
Paperback
How to Be a Cat: (Cat Books for Kids, Cat Gifts for Kids, Cat Picture Book)
Lazar, Ralph
Swerling, Lisa
Hardcover
The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason
Chapo Trap House
Hardcover
Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers: A Little Book of Whimsy and Wisdom from the Files of the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
Hardcover
Wtf America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy
Meiselas, Jordy
Meiselas, Ben
Meiselas, Brett
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Not Today, Fascists: The Lies That Got Us Here, and the Truths That Will Reunite Us
Welch, Jennifer
Hardcover
Pardon My Book: Ten Years of the Best (and Worst) in Sports from Pardon My Take
Big Cat
Commenter, Pft
Hardcover
Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love
Posnanski, Joe
Schur, Michael
Hardcover
We've Been Here the Whole Time!: A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America
Clift, Joey
Paperback
How to Grow Up Without Becoming a Grown-Up: Big Lessons from Little Kids
Shapiro-Barnum, Julian
Hardcover
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Five Novels in One Outrageous Volume
Adams, Douglas
Paperback
Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy from Vaudeville to '90s Sitcoms
Bennett, Geoff
Hardcover
The New Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Expert Advice for Extreme Situations
Borgenicht, David
Piven, Joshua
Hardcover
We Are the World (Cup): A Personal History of the World's Greatest Sporting Event
Bennett, Roger
Hardcover
There Are Moms Way Worse Than You: Irrefutable Proof That You Are Indeed a Fantastic Parent
Boozan, Glenn
Hardcover
Bake It Off: An Unofficial Taylor Swift-Inspired Cookbook for Every Era, from Breakfast to Midnights
Smith, Lindsey
Hardcover
Nobody Wants Your Sh*t: The Art of Decluttering Before You Die (New York Times Bestseller)
Condo, Messie
Hardcover
How to Talk to Your Cat about Gun Safety: And Abstinence, Drugs, Satanism, and Other Dangers That Threaten Their Nine Lives
Auburn, Zachary
Paperback