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A Unified Theory of Mental Suffering
For more than two decades Dr. David Kessler, pediatrician, FDA commissioner under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and the author of The End of Overeating, researched the ways tobacco and food control our actions.
His new book Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering (Harper Wave, 2016) posits that the same neurological process that drives people to chain-smoke or over-eat is responsible for many mental illnesses like depression or eating disorders. Dr. Kessler has termed this process "capture."
"Capture is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brain's commandeered by forces outside of our control. Simply put, a stimulus, it could be a place, a thought, a memory, a person takes hold of our attention. It shifts our perception."
Dr. Kessler explained how this mechanism of capture is responsible for a whole host of mental issues: "With depression attention gets focused on negative aspects of our world, of ourselves. With eating disorders there's a capture of food. With obsessions or addictions there's a capture of a substance."