Andrew Scull

In this acclaimed work, Andrew Scull, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry, sheds light on its troubled history. For more than two hundred years, disturbances of reason, cognition, and emotion—the sort of things that were once called 'madness'—have been described and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, it is said, is an illness like any other—a...

Written by one of the world’s most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm’s decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness....

This ambitious volume, worldwide in scope and ranging from antiquity to the present, examines the human encounter with Unreason in all its manifestations, the challenges it poses to society, and our responses to it. In twelve chapters organised chronologically from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern...