Anne Harrington masterfully chronicles the hopes--and the hype--surrounding psychiatry's much-heralded 'biological revolution' in this penetrating, capacious, and immensely engaging account.--Elizabeth Lunbeck, author of The Americanization of Narcissism
A lucid and compelling analysis of the travails of psychiatry as it has attempted to ground its understanding of mental illness in biology.--Steven E. Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research
By charting our fluctuating beliefs about our own minds, [Anne] Harrington effectively tells a story about the twentieth century itself.--Jerome Groopman "The New Yorker"
A compelling story of the ongoing mission to understand and treat our troubled minds.--Nina MacLaughlin "Boston Globe"
Enthralling.... Harrington takes us on a fascinating tour of the up-and-down history of pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disorders.--Alison Abbott "Nature"
When it comes to doctoring the body, you have to go back to the 19th century to find a time when the theories were baseless... and the treatments often harmful.... For doctoring the mind, as Anne Harrington's fine history of psychiatry shows, that point is much more recent.-- "Economist"
Harrington's grasp of this story and the clarity with which, with limited moralism, she delivers a tale about the 'big picture' of psychiatry and neurology is emblematic of the historian's craft.--Stephen T. Casper "Science"
The story Harrington tells is one of push-and-pull, back-and-forth.... Intricate and winding, though her prose remains clear and crisp.--Jennifer Szalai "New York Times"
Disagreement is central to psychiatry, a fact that resonates throughout Anne Harrington's masterful history.--Philip Alcabes "Los Angeles Review of Books"
A tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.... Of value to historians of medicine.--Gary Greenberg "Atlantic"