Desperate Remedies

CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES AND DAILY TELEGRAPH

''A riveting chronicle of faulty science, false promises, arrogance, greed, and shocking disregard for the wellbeing of patients suffering from mental disorders. An eloquent, meticulously documented, clear-eyed call for change'' Dirk Wittenborn

In this masterful work, Andrew Scull, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry, sheds light on its troubled history

For more than two hundred years, disturbances of reason, cognition and emotion - the sort of things that were once called ''madness'' - have been described and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, it is said, is an illness like any other - a disorder that can treated by doctors, whose suffering can be eased, and from which patients can return. And yet serious mental illness remains a profound mystery that is in some ways no closer to being solved than it was at the start of the twentie