Desperate Remedies

Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

By: Andrew Scull

Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble

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.

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.

Carefully researched, 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.

©2022 Andrew Scull (P)2022 Tantor

Provocative evidence based.

Evidence based. I would have enjoyed seeing an epilogue that included a colloquy between defenders of the psychiatric faith and the author. Some point counter point! Excellent summary of the apparent situation. A book that prompts me to google for counter arguments to see if I can find holes in the thesis. But seemingly very strong. Well done!

Excellent

Every sentence in this hefty tome deserves a careful listen. The best history and current state of the discipline I’ve read.

Fair if dismal history of psychiatry.

Scull has made a good career as a historian of psychiatry and this book seems to be his crowning achievement. Although the chapters are written to stand alone causing some repetition, his account rings true to my experience as a practicing psychiatrist.

A Chilling Reminder that Doctors are not Saints

This book is timely. I got here by way of Jonathan Haidt's recommendation in his book "The Righteous Mind". This book is a chilling reminder that "cures" are not always cures and doctors are not solely motivated by care for their patients. And that this is especially true when sickness is resistant to known cures. Reading this book, I was struck by the abuse we tacitly approved of people already suffering.

This book is a timely reminder with a backdrop of a certain virus that shall remain unnamed in this review so as not to upset our tech overlords. Fortunately, modern medicine is impervious to the character flaws of the previous generations of doctors and would never latch onto desperate remedies of their own.

Comment on Performance

Once in a while there is a different man narrating, It is almost like a second person went through and fixed some errors in the original recording, the first man couldn't fix the errors due to scheduling, and this new man tried do an impression of the original narrator. It is subtle but I had to stop a couple times and think if I had been hearing the voice wrong. Not a major issue. Good story and lots and lots to take in with all the facts and what not.