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Desperate Remedies: Psychiatryâs Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness
Top of the pile
76
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
60/100Critics
74/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Andrew Scull
Publisher:
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Date:
May 17, 2022
From jails to hospitals to the analyst's couch, the venues of psychiatry have shifted amid debate over the nature of mental illness: is it psychosocial or biological? Andrew Scull follows the path from the asylum to the street, from shock therapies to talk therapy, and on to psychiatry's dependence on drugs, whose side effects are often ignored.
What The Reviewers Say
... grim but fascinating.
... dominated by extremes and hopes. It is meticulously researched and beautifully written, and even funny at times, despite the harrowing content.
This is a chilling book.
Ours is a time of historical reckoning for many fields, and psychiatry is no exception. An indisputable masterpiece among a flurry of reappraisals is Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies—a comprehensive, fascinating and persuasive narrative of the past 200 years of psychiatry in America.
