Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

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by Andrew Scull · 2022

A critical history of roughly two centuries of attempts to understand and treat mental disorders in the United States. Andrew Scull traces psychiatry from the rise of the asylum in the 1830s through psychoanalysis, institutional treatments, drug trials, and genetic research in the 2000s.

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1 episode featuring Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

Lex Fridman Podcast
Psychiatry confronts its history of certainty and harm
The episode asks how a field with an uncertain evidence base can treat severe suffering without repeating the institutional and commercial abuses of its past.
Sep 17, 2026 · 3h 44m

1 episode featuring Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

Psychiatry confronts its history of certainty and harm