Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull

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Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull

Author: Andrew Scull

A sweeping history of American psychiatry—from the mental hospital to the brain lab—that reveals the devastating treatments doctors have inflicted on their patients (especially women) in the name of science and questions our massive reliance on meds.

For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind—the sorts of things that were once called “madness”—have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, whose origins can be identified and from which one can be cured. But is this true?

In this masterful account of America’s quest to understand and treat everything from anxiety to psychosis, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today sheds light on its tumultuous past. Desperate Remedies brings together a galaxy of mind doctors working in and out of institutional settings: psychologists and psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, and cognitive behavioral therapists, social reformers and advocates of mental hygiene, as well as patients and their families desperate for relief.