If you're tired of only hearing about bipolar people in crime reports or on Entertainment Tonight, this book may be just the tonic you're looking for...
Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi's new book "A First-Rate Madness" suggests that when the going gets tough, the last thing we need is a homoclite or "normal" leader... what we really need are leaders who are are a little off.
“The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.”
There's an interview with him in the Globe and Mail this week...
In what ways can mental health be a liability for a leader?
As some scientific research shows, normal (mentally healthy) subjects show less evidence of traits that are useful for crisis leadership: realism and empathy (persons with depressive symptoms have more of these traits than normal subjects), and creativity and resilience (persons with manic symptoms have more of these traits than normal subjects).
and a review by Janey Maslin in the good ol' New York Times, where she seems to take a dislike to the theory and the book, but whatever...
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