In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms.
This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones.
Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, says that psychiatry’s biological triumphalism began to unravel in the 1990s and the 2000s.
“Harrington does not romanticize the world of mental illness before drugs — drugs that many patients credit with offering relief and even a chance at survival,” critic Jennifer Szalai said in a review published in The New York Times.
“What psychiatry needs to do, she says, is narrow its focus to the most severe forms of mental illness and ‘make a virtue of modesty’ rather than hubris,” Szalai said.
“Harrington knows it is a somewhat fanciful idea, but it is a measure of her own clear-eyed approach that she appeals to psychiatric practitioners’ self-interest by invoking that most valuable and (these days) elusive currency: Trust,” the critic added.
