Book ID: CBB599271041

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (2022)

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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. Andrew Scull begins with the birth of the asylum in the reformist zeal of the 1830s and carries us through to the latest drug trials and genetic studies. He carefully reconstructs the rise and fall of state-run mental hospitals to explain why so many of the mentally ill are now on the street and why so many of those whose bodies were experimented on were women. In his compelling closing chapters, he reveals how drug companies expanded their reach to treat a growing catalog of ills, leading to an epidemic of over-prescribing while deliberately concealing debilitating side effects. Carefully researched and compulsively readable, Desperate Remedies is a definitive account of America’s long battle with mental illness that challenges us to rethink our deepest assumptions about who we are and how we think and feel.

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Review Dennis Doyle (2023) Review of "Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 341-342). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB599271041/

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Authors & Contributors
Montgomery, Sarah Fawn
M. Cristina Amoretti
Daker, Mauricio V.
Ropper, Allan H.
Mason, Daniel
Bruce M. Z. Cohen
Concepts
Psychiatry
Mental disorders and diseases
Philosophy of medicine
Nosology; classification of diseases
Diagnosis
Normality
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
19th century
20th century, late
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Georgia (U.S.)
China
Great Britain
Institutions
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
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