9780393071221-0393071227-Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

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

ISBN-13: 9780393071221
ISBN-10: 0393071227
Edition: 1
Author: Anne Harrington
Publication date: 2019
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Hardcover 384 pages
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Book details

ISBN-13: 9780393071221
ISBN-10: 0393071227
Edition: 1
Author: Anne Harrington
Publication date: 2019
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Hardcover 384 pages

Summary

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (ISBN-13: 9780393071221 and ISBN-10: 0393071227), written by authors Anne Harrington, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. With an overall rating of 3.9 stars, it's a notable title among other Mental Health (History, Psychology & Counseling, Psychiatry, Psychology, History) books. You can easily purchase or rent Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (Hardcover) from BooksRun, along with many other new and used Mental Health books and textbooks. And, if you're looking to sell your copy, our current buyback offer is $0.53.

Description

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.

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