Desperate Remedies

Andrew T. Scull

"A sweeping history of American psychiatry-from jails to hospitals to the lab to the analyst's couch-by the award-winning author of Madness in Civilization. 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: physicians and psychoanalysts, psychologists, neuroscientists, and therapists, social reformers and advocates of...