Psychiatry and Its Discontents

"From the Victorian asylum era and the rise and fall of psychoanalysis to the arrival of psychopharmacology and neuroscience, Scull chronicles the medicalization of mental illness with balance and scepticism. He is trenchant on psychiatry’s failures, from prefrontal lobotomy to ‘care in the community’; critical of neuro-reductionism; eloquent on diagnosis debates; and ever aware of the human suffering at his chronicle’s core.” * Nature *
“As a collection of previously published material gathered from diverse sources, this book suffers from a certain amount of repetition; however the author has done a service in bringing it together, the writing is lively, the scandals attached to its principal actors are dutifully weighed and the scholarship is impressive.” * Times Literary Supplement *
"A lucid mixture of biography, bibliography, and historiography – a personal narrative of the shifting terrain of madness scholarship over five decades." * Medical Health News *
“Scull’s encyclopedic knowledge of American (and British) psychiatry has something to teach any reader.” * Social Service Review *
“[Scull’s] writing combines the structural curiosity of the sociologist with the historian’s quizzical eye and interest in causation. Scull’s significant corpus in the history of madness ranges from the rise of the asylum and psychiatry’s slow, fitful emergence under its eaves to a magisterial study of madness in world civilisations. It provides necessary ballast for the volume’s freewheeling adventurism.”
  * Australian Book Review *