Psychiatry has been called the stepchild of medicine, experiencing far less progress than care of the body. Andrew Scull, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego, chronicles the history of Psychiatry in America in his latest book, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s turbulent quest to cure mental illness. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Andrew discuss this history including the rise and rapid fall of asylums, and the procession of remedies that offered false hope to the afflicted. Andrew also shares his research on the pharmaceutical industry and how the reliance on drugs to treat mental illness has grown.

Andrew Scull has written multiple books on the history of psychiatry, including Madness, a very short introduction and Hysteria: The Biography.

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How asylums first started

35:30: We build asylums to rescue people from the gutter, the prison, and the jail and put them in a therapeutic environment. The therapeutic environment deteriorates and indeed becomes anti-therapeutic in many ways, but then, beginning slowly in the late 1950s but much more expeditiously from the late 1960s onwards, we empty these hospitals out and don't put anything in their place.

20:12: Mental illness, more generally, it's not just the desperation of the patients we're talking about; it's the desperation of their family members and everybody close to them in the face of the disasters.

Neglecting the voices that caused the bigger problem

45:21: There were enough voices being raised in the late seventies, early eighties about the defects that we should have addressed those issues now, but it was politically inexpedient.

Are drugs the only way to treat mental illness?

1:00:27: I doubt drugs will ever be the whole answer. It's also important to consider all sorts of environmental things and ways in which we can provide the kinds of levels of social support that can mitigate the problems that come with this.

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Guest Profile:

His Work:

245. Mental Illness Throughout History feat. Andrew Scull

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc