Anxiety may be the defining feeling of our current era, and though it affects many people on a deeply personal level, the last few years have also witnessed the rise of more communal feelings of dread and unknowing, problems that sometimes seem too big to face. Will the United States remain a democracy? Can we still have meaningful lives amid the rubble of late capitalism and the inevitable creep of climate change? How do we even start to grapple with a problem so large it seems to pervade almost every corner of our lives?

In Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room, Jonathan Foiles, a licensed psychotherapist and lecturer at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, explains how philosophy can help us respond to these deep questions and communal worries about modern life. Read how S ren Kierkegaard can speak to feelings of helplessness in the face of police violence, how Hannah Arendt can help us rethink the seemingly unavoidable problem of a warming planet, and how social advocates like Jane Addams and Dorothy Day can offer hope and resolve in a world that sometimes seems like it's already ended.

Thoughtful, discerning, personal, and accessible, Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room will serve as a concise companion for anyone looking to address our cultural unease and find new ways to face it together.

Jonathan Foiles weaves together psychology and public policy, exploring the trauma underlying urbanization in a book Kirkus Reviews calls an urgent call for reform.

When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between specializing in either mental health or public policy. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. As he counseled poor patients from Chicago's South and West Sides, he realized individual therapy couldn't account for all the ways unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing, and other policy decisions impacted the well-being of both individuals and communities.

Through a series of beautifully written and accessible case studies, Foiles lets us in on the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. He teaches us how he makes diagnoses, explains how therapists before him would analyze his patients, and teaches us about the profound ways that policy decisions contribute to individual suffering.

A remarkable, unique work of medical writing that serves as a call to action, this report by an experienced mental health professional is a must-read for anyone interested in the overlaps between mental health, public policy, and urbanization.

A passionate and well-informed study on the importance of improving inclusiveness in mental health evaluations.―Kirkus Reviews

In a clear, empathetic style, Jonathan Foiles, author of the critically acclaimed This City Is Killing Me, takes us through troubling examples of bias in mental health work. Placing them in context of past blunders in the history of psychiatry and the DSM, he looks closely at questions that lay bare the intersections between mental health care, race, gender, and sexuality:

• Why are women more likely to be labeled borderline personalities?


• Is transphobia being treated today like homosexuality was in the past?


• Has protest psychosis, a term used to diagnose Black men during the civil rights era, simply been renamed schizoaffective disorder?


• How different is our current label of intellectual disability from the history of eugenics?


• What does it actually mean to be diagnosed with a mental illness?

This slim but wide-ranging collection of essays wrestles with these questions and offers potential ways forward in a world where mental health diagnoses can be helpful, but not necessarily absolute.

A pragmatic and sympathetic guide to how we might craft a better and more just therapeutic future for all people.