At last, after a 50-year detour through the psychoanalytic wilderness, psychiatry...confirmed that mental disorders are brain diseases after all ... The historian of science Anne Harrington has a problem with such triumphalist narratives ... Her jarring verdict notwithstanding, Ms. Harrington’s superb book is a nuanced account of biological psychiatry. ... In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington has written an excellent, engaging guide to what biological psychiatry has accomplished—and not accomplished—so far.
Disagreement 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.
... masterpiece ... a readable, revisionist synthesis that shows that mind and brain medicine has not come as far as we imagine or wish. Harrington writes energetically about the contributions of seminal figures in psychiatry, neurology, and biology ... Harrington’s grasp of this story and the clarity with which, with limited moralism, she delivers a tale about the 'big picture' of psychiatry and neurology is emblematic of the historian’s craft.
Harrington is right to sigh over what has too often proved to be a yelling match between equally deaf opponents—members of an ambitious profession convinced that psychiatry is making strides toward understanding mental illness, and critics who believe it is at best a misguided attempt to help suffering people and at worst a pseudoscience enabling social control at the expense of human dignity ... Harrington’s dispassion as she chronicles the rise and fall of various biological theories of mental illness will make this book of value to historians of medicine. It may even allow critics and advocates of biological psychiatry alike to gain a deeper appreciation of the historical stream in which they are swimming, and to stop trying to drown one another. But her restraint carries a risk: that she will underplay the significance of the troubles she is reporting ... the fact that the brain is a chunk of meat bathing in a chemical broth does not yield the fact that conscious suffering is purely biological, or even that this is the best way to approach mental illness. Those unresolved, and perhaps unanswerable, moral questions loom over the history that Harrington traces here. The path she has chosen may require her to steer clear of such knotty concerns as the relationship of mind to brain or the relationship of political order to mental illness. But her account doesn’t just skirt the polemics she decries. It also overlooks the consequences of psychiatrists’ ignoring those questions, or using scientific rhetoric to conceal them.
Harrington has written a challenging book. The shortcomings of current ideas in the causes and treatments of mental disease are clearly documented. Her insights into the social aspects of treatment deserve to be addressed. She gives us a challenge to move beyond the boundaries that different disciplines have established so that a comprehensive and coordinated attack on mental illness can be launched.
A thorough and well-researched account ... Beneath the author’s firm, stately prose, which never becomes alarmist or provocative, lies a bleak assessment of the mental health profession. Its practitioners come across as hampered by the current, insufficient state of understanding of how the mind functions and malfunctions as well as prompted by jealousy, fear, greed, and a desire to one-up those they see as their competitors ... A measured, insightful survey of the limits of contemporary treatment for mental illness.
Harrington lucidly and accessibly chronicles the search for mental illness’s elusive causes ... Anyone interested in mental health care’s history and future will appreciate this informative and rewarding survey.
