The Troubled History of Psychiatry

In “Mind Fixers” (Norton), Anne Harrington, a history-of-science professor at Harvard, follows “psychiatry’s troubled search for the biology of mental illness,” deftly tracing a progression of paradigms adopted by neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, as well as patients and their advocates. Proof of a causal relationship between the condition and syphilis came in 1897, and marked the first time, Harrington writes, that “psychiatry had discovered a specific biological cause for a common mental illness.” Neurologists of the time, knowing nothing of brain chemistry, were heavily focussed on what could be observed at autopsy, but there were many mental illnesses that left no trace in the solid tissue of the brain.

Source: www.newyorker.com