The Sorrows of Psychiatry

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness Anne Harrington W. W. Norton (2019)

In January 1973, Science published an article called ‘On being sane in insane places’. Certain discoveries, such as the findings in 1897 and 1913 confirming that syphilis causes late-onset psychosis, bolstered biologists’ view that mental disorders were brain-based. By the 1990s, it was clear that major advances had stalled, and that psychiatrists’ diagnostic criteria (for example in the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, introduced in 1952 and now in its fifth edition) were less than helpful (see D. Dobbs Nature 497, 36–37; 2013).

Source: www.nature.com