Overview

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.

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Andrew Scull is the author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine; Hysteria: The Disturbing History; Madness: A Very Short Introduction; and Psychiatry and Its Discontents, among other books. Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, he won the Roy Porter Medal for lifetime contribution to the history of medicine and the Eric Carlson award for lifetime contributions to the history of psychiatry. He has contributed to many documentaries, including PBS's Mysteries of Mental Illness and The Lobotomist, has written for the The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement, Scientific American, and The Nation, and blogs for Psychology Today and Mad in America. Jonathan Keeble, winner of four AudioFile Earphones Awards, combines his audio work with a busy theater and television career. He has been featured in over six hundred radio plays for the BBC, appearing in everything from Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Who and The Archers, in which he played the evil Owen. As an Earphones Award-winning narrator, he is in high demand for his voice work. He has recorded over two hundred audiobooks.

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