Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness Audiobook (Free)

Mind Fixers tells the annals of psychiatry’s search to comprehend the biological basis of mental disease and asks where we need to move from here.

AT HEART Fixers, Anne Harrington, writer of The Treat Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly disappointed struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth hundred years efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and interpersonal scientists to demand, with some justification, that they had better ways of about Brain Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness analyzing and fixing minds.

But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry right into a state of crisis a new “biological revolution” was designed to alleviate. Harrington displays how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in technology, and why the field provides fallen right into a state of crisis inside our own time.

Brain Fixers makes apparent that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by advancements in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising selection of sociable factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Authorities programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, market profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical mass media have all added to the story as well.

In focusing particularly for the seek out the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high individual stakes for the millions of people who have wanted medical answers because of their mental suffering. This isn’t just a story about doctors and researchers, but about countless common people and their loved ones.

A clear-eyed, evenhanded, yet passionate tour de force, Brain Fixers recounts days gone by and present struggle to help to make mental illness a biological issue in order to place the groundwork for creating a better future, both for individuals who suffer and for those whose job it is to look after them.