Desperate Remedies

Sociologist Andrew Scull gives a critical history of two centuries of efforts in the United States to understand and treat mental illness. He starts with the rise of the asylum in the reforming spirit of the 1830s and carries the story to recent drug trials and genetic research. State hospitals held half a million people by 1950, while the wealthy were treated at home with substances such as morphine and strychnine. Scull follows hydrotherapy, insulin shock, electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy, the work of psychoanalysts and neuroscientists, and the uneven history of psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He also argues that drug companies hid debilitating side effects as they widened their reach.

Lex Fridman listed it, along with Madness in Civilization, among Scull's books that he highly recommends.