Retrain Your Anxious Brain:  Practical And Effective Tools To Conquer Anxiety, by John Tsilimparis with Daylle Deanne Scwartz

[Image of Anthony Fantano taken from his video of some terrible Future album.]

Reading this book was quite a personal revelation, but I have to admit that my enjoyment of this book was greatly limited by my offense at the way the authors went about their subject.  It is a frequent criticism and complaint of mine that many books on anxiety want to promote Buddhist thinking rather than wrestle with the biblical approach to dealing with anxiety through faith and hope and moral courage.  This book gave some rather pointed examples of why it is that so many books about anxiety fail to satisfy by taking the negative tendencies I have long noted in many volumes on anxiety and taking those failures to extremes.  This book is quite possibly the worst book I have ever read on the subject of anxiety, and its failures are illustrative in how one should not write a book on the subject of anxiety and how one should not approach the subject of mental health in general.  In fact, the stunning lack of self-awareness on the part of this book’s authors made them appear not only to be tools, but to be immense hypocrites as well.

Containing a bit more than 200 pages, this book is made up of twelve chapters between its introduction and the usual bibliography, index, and acknowledgments sections.  The authors begin with a discussion on understanding anxiety (1).  After this they seek for the reader to identify their personal belief system (2)–without any recognition or acknowledgment of universal moral standards.  After this the authors seek to challenge “consensus reality” (3) (but apparently not their own consensus) and attack the dualistic mind of good and evil (4) (while not addressing their own black and white judgmental attitude, naturally).  The authors urge the reader to rise beyond the illusion of control (5) and urge readers to be accountable to themselves (6), yet without the illusion of control, let us remember.  After this the authors urge people to create their own reality (7) and solidify the sense of self (8) that few people seem to lack in our bumptious and self-absorbed age.  The authors urge extreme acceptance (despite not being accepting of conservatives or genuinely religious people themselves) (9), while encouraging the reader to reduce anxiety in intimate relationships (assuming one has them) (10).  Finally, the authors close the book with chapters on how to maintain anxiety reduction (11), and making peace with one’s anxiety through surrender (12).

While this book was certainly among the worst books I have read in psychology, and that is a tough competition, even reading bad books has its worth.  The book would have been a lot better if the authors had been more savvy in handling their various pet agendas.  Most psychology books are written to promote a particular approach to mental health, but few authors have as many unwholesome and worthless agendas to pursue as these authors, as they demonstrate an immense hostility to Judeo-Christian thought and practice that demonstrates an immensely warped mind, a desire to condemn closemindedness, but only that on the right and not on the left (which they strongly identify with), and a solipsism that encourages the worst tendencies of contemporary culture for people to create their own reality and to deny unpleasant realities or recognize that no one else is under any obligation to respect that which is a self-created and fictive reality, whether in identity politics or anything else.  While this book is bad, it is bad in useful ways, letting the reader know that there are people who fancy themselves experts on matters of psychological importance who have no clue how hypocritical they are and how much their writing serves to embarrass them as being without worthwhile insight even about one of the most noteworthy mental health crises of our time.