Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

Overview

Scull maps out the progression of the treatment of mental disorders, beginning in the 19th century with state asylums or state hospitals whose inhabitants, “poor and the friendless”, reached a population of half a million by 1950. The wealthy, on the other hand, got treated at home with often dangerous substances such as morphine and strychnine. Scull details the personalities and progress behind other treatments like Hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, insulin shock therapy, injections of camphor, Metrazol, electroconvulsive or “shock” therapy, as well as frequently deadly surgical interventions such as colectomy, and lobotomy. He also explores the progression of disease models from humorism to the biochemical model of mental illness, and the advent of psychopharmacology and the development and travails of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.