PanTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Though Stock is a skilled journalist and fiction writer, the book’s structure is disjointed and its goals are unclear. It serves partly as a biography of Sargant, but fails to situate him within the broader medical context of brain regionalization or to address the gender and class dynamics of the time. Though it opens by considering psychiatry as a form of social control, it doesn’t explore this theme in depth. The patient interviews are not analysed and the women’s stories are not connected to larger societal patterns.
