Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
Description
In Mind Fixers, "the preeminent historian of neuroscience" (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder. She shows that psychiatry's waxing and waning theories have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.
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About the Author
Anne Harrington is a senior lecturer in Ethics, Public Health, Mentor in Practice, Leadership & Management and Study Skills at Brighton University. Anne has been teaching for nearly 25 years, and is passionate about supporting and enhancing students' learning experience. Her PhD in Education focused on the students' experience of academic support in higher education and reported that many of them who had their prior academic education overseas found it difficult to develop critical and analytical thinking when writing their essays.
Reviews
By charting our fluctuating beliefs about our own minds, [Anne] Harrington effectively tells a story about the twentieth century itself.--Jerome Groopman
Anne Harrington masterfully chronicles the hopes--and the hype--surrounding psychiatry's much-heralded 'biological revolution' in this penetrating, capacious, and immensely engaging account.--Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism
A compelling story of the ongoing mission to understand and treat our troubled minds.--Nina MacLaughlin
Enthralling.... Harrington takes us on a fascinating tour of the up-and-down history of pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disorders.--Alison Abbott
When it comes to doctoring the body, you have to go back to the 19th century to find a time when the theories were baseless... and the treatments often harmful.... For doctoring the mind, as Anne Harrington's fine history of psychiatry shows, that point is much more recent.
A lucid and compelling analysis of the travails of psychiatry as it has attempted to ground its understanding of mental illness in biology.--Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research
The story Harrington tells is one of push-and-pull, back-and-forth.... Intricate and winding, though her prose remains clear and crisp.--Jennifer Szalai
Disagreement is central to psychiatry, a fact that resonates throughout Anne Harrington's masterful history.--Philip Alcabes
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.... Of value to historians of medicine.--Gary Greenberg
