Hayat Okulu Rehberi

The book's strongest pages come from the author's profession. The emergency room, in the author's words, is «a miniature world». A young woman arrives with chest tightness and numb hands; the complaint is stress-related and she is referred to a psychiatrist — but what do you say to someone who answers «I already see a psychiatrist, I take sedatives, and I'm still not at peace»? A young person terrified of the university exam, sitting at the desk day and night and understanding nothing. A man of fifty who has lost his job and sobs on the stretcher: «You cannot solve all his problems by giving him a sedative.» These observations are sincere and affecting.

The central thesis is simple: behind hundreds of different complaints lies one common thing — unhappiness, caused by «a wrongly lived life». So the solution is common too: a rightly lived life. The author notes that we spend over twenty years in systematic training to become doctors and take courses for a driving licence, yet nobody teaches us how to live. George Bernard Shaw's line «I would have liked to grow wise without growing old» is the programme's motto: had a ten-year-old been given a guide to life's most important rules, much would have turned out differently.

The best metaphor in the book comes from the author's own life. As a student in their twenties, the author tried on a friend's new glasses out of curiosity and was astonished at how sharp the world suddenly looked — the myopia was only 0.50 dioptres. Patients who exclaim «You've lit up my world, doctor!» after cataract surgery are the same: because blurred vision arrives slowly, people take it for normal. Life, the author argues, is often seen «through a misted window», and all we need is the right pair of glasses — sometimes a book, sometimes a friend.

The goals chapter is made of familiar formulas: write your goals down, visualise them, «if someone else did it, so can I», ignore the opinions of failures, «success is contagious». The most serious problem surfaces here: the author claims that only 3% of Yale graduates had written goals and that twenty years later nearly all of them had reached them. This «study» never took place; researchers showed long ago that it does not exist. The idea of «developing the right lobe of the brain to think like a genius» is likewise a popular myth.

There is a more troubling point. The author writes: «If you are unhappy, it is your own fault. If you want to be happy, nobody can make you unhappy.» Sentences about patients who abandon antidepressant treatment, and advice not to expect anything from psychiatrists, could mislead a reader who really is depressed. Yet the author also writes that the unemployed man's problem cannot be solved with a pill — in other words, unhappiness has social causes too. This contradiction is never resolved.

The language is plain and warm, the chapters short, the quotations — from Montaigne to Lao Tzu, from Nietzsche to Rumi — plentiful. The book is written from a religious outlook, and the last part of the programme is devoted to faith. In the end «Hayat Okulu Rehberi» is well-meaning but very general: the doctor's observations make it worth reading, while its claims need checking.

• Vivid, humane observations from the emergency room
• A clear structure comparing life to a road trip
• Plain, warm and quick-to-read language