RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksDisagreement is central to psychiatry, a fact that resonates throughout Anne Harrington’s masterful history ... Harrington unpacks the complicated attempts to link human brain chemistry to madness with crystalline clarity, showing just how little evidence there was for chemical fluctuations causing any psychic illness that could be validly and reliably diagnosed ... Harrington’s book isn’t an indictment of the pharmaceutical companies, though. There are too many players on the stage of modern mental illness, and the book refreshingly avoids singling out any one as the villain (although the book makes clear that private insurance companies have much to answer for) ... To Harrington’s credit, Mind Fixers ends with a proposal for an alternative: a bigger tent ... Overall, though, the story that Mind Fixers tells is a tragedy. So much mental effort, by so many dedicated human beings, has gone into understanding the mind in ways that will keep the \'unscientific\' Freudian drama at bay.
Beth Macy
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksDespite her fidelity to the conventional narratives—poor white despair, evil Big Pharma—what emerges from Macy’s detailed account is a radically different view of the opioid epidemic. Where the factories and mines have closed down and the safety net, after years of budget cutting, is in tatters, selling drugs is a way to get by. You can clear a few grand a month as a low-level distributor, even more if you don’t dip into the product yourself ... But it has been much harder to see when the unemployed in question are white. The simple truth doesn’t sit well with us: today, even for white people, selling drugs pays better than working. Even Macy has a hard time grasping this fact, perhaps because of the curious racial bias that deforms her narrative. Other than Purdue Pharma, the only figures on whom she specifically pins responsibility for overdose deaths in the region are two black heroin dealers ... What comes through most clearly from Dopesica is that we have to undo the vast transfer of wealth from poor and middle-class Americans to the rich.
