The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.
The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. As her subtitle indicates, this is not a story of steady progress. Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.
LINK: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fixers-anne-harrington/583228/