Description
Book SynopsisWritten by one of the world's most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm's decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book's historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of community care. The essays in Psychiatry and Its Discontents provide a vivid and compelling portrait of the recurring crises of legitimacy experienced by mad-doctors, as psychiatrists were once called, and illustrates the impact of psychiatry's ideas and interventions on the lives of those afflicted with mental illness.
Trade Review"From the Victorian asylum era and the rise and fall of psychoanalysis to the arrival of psychopharmacology and neuroscience, Scull chronicles the medicalization of mental illness with balance and scepticism. He is trenchant on psychiatry’s failures, from prefrontal lobotomy to ‘care in the community’; critical of neuro-reductionism; eloquent on diagnosis debates; and ever aware of the human suffering at his chronicle’s core.” * Nature *
“As a collection of previously published material gathered from diverse sources, this book suffers from a certain amount of repetition; however the author has done a service in bringing it together, the writing is lively, the scandals attached to its principal actors are dutifully weighed and the scholarship is impressive.” * Times Literary Supplement *
"A lucid mixture of biography, bibliography, and historiography – a personal narrative of the shifting terrain of madness scholarship over five decades." * Medical Health News *
“Scull’s encyclopedic knowledge of American (and British) psychiatry has something to teach any reader.” * Social Service Review *
“[Scull’s] writing combines the structural curiosity of the sociologist with the historian’s quizzical eye and interest in causation. Scull’s significant corpus in the history of madness ranges from the rise of the asylum and psychiatry’s slow, fitful emergence under its eaves to a magisterial study of madness in world civilisations. It provides necessary ballast for the volume’s freewheeling adventurism.”
* Australian Book Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Travails of Psychiatry
PART 1. The Asylum and Its Discontents
2. The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship: Madness and Civilization Revisited
3. The Asylum, the Hospital, and the Clinic
4. A Culture of Complaint: Psychiatry and Its Critics
5. Promises of Miracles: Religion as Science, and Science as Religion
PART 2. Whither Twentieth-Century Psychiatry?
6. Burying Freud
7. Psychobiology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis: The Intersecting Careers of Adolf Meyer, Phyllis Greenacre, and Curt Richter
8. Mangling Memories
9. Creating a New Psychiatry: On the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of Academic Psychiatry
PART 3. Transformations and Interpretations
10. Shrinks: Doctor Pangloss
11. The Hunting of the Snark: The Search for a History of Neuropsychiatry
12. Contending Professions: Sciences of Brain and Mind in the United States, 1900–2013
PART 4. Neuroscience and the Biological Turn
13. Trauma
14. Empathy: Reading Other People’s Minds
15. Mind, Brain, Law, and Culture
16. Left Brain, Right Brain, One Brain, Two Brains
17. Delusions of Progress: Psychiatry’s Diagnostic Manual
Notes
Index
