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    Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
    Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
    Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
    Audiobook11 hours

    Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

    Written by Anne Harrington

    Narrated by Joyce Bean

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here.

    In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.

    But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time.

    Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well.

    In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones.

    A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, 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, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 16, 2019
    ISBN9781721339556
    Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
    Author

    Anne Harrington

    Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, as well as the author of three books, including Reenchanted Science and The Cure Within. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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    • 2/5
      This is a highly subjective and biased account of the history of medicine which blames psychiatry for all the missteps of medicine or neurology from the 1800s. The author is a historian who studied the history of medicine but chose to scapegoat psychiatry as the septic tank of medicine where all the bad things done by nineteenth century physicians and indeed the wider society of humans is now blamed on psychiatry. She believes that majority of people with mental illnesses are fakes and only those with severe mental illness deserve to see a psychiatrist. Yet she deems all mental illnesses illegitimate because there are No underlying biological evidence to confirm that they are diseases. She even describes a woman who is in pain from childbirth as not necessarily needing a pain killer because she doesn’t have a disease just like a person suffering a mental illness does not need medication because they don’t have a disease. She stigmatizes people who have depression and anxiety as being the worried well who need to deal with their mental distress like her students struggling to complete their assignments need to deal with their stress. She rubbishes the impact of psychiatric medications on the recovery of people with mental illness including schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and depression. She claims that since the placebo effect accounts for most of the effect of psychotropic medications, people should just get on with their lives and stop seeking pharmacotherapy. In blaming psychiatry for not finding a biological basis for mental illness she forgets that the brain is so complex that we don’t have enough innovations at the moment to fully understand the brain. Yet she has the audacity to tell psychiatry to aim for more collaborations with other specialties and to practice humility in its understanding of the brain. This book contains so many contradictions that I firmly believe that the author is so detached from the reality of people suffering from mental illness that she is able to put her own egotistical ideas over and above human suffering. She should be ashamed of herself for casting mentally ill patients as frauds and fakes who don’t have a disease because psychiatry cannot prove the biological basis of mental illness. The only reason I gave her two stars is because she made the effort to compile the historical facts but her interpretation of the reasons behind most of the facts is horrendous.
    • 3/5
      History of how psychiatrists and other doctors kept returning to a search for physical sources of mental illness, even during the age of Freud; the brain keeps being rediscovered as the problem instead of the mind, even as particular theories of why tend to fail in various ways and have historically supported various forms of discrimination.