Mind Fixers
by Anne Harrington · first published 2019
6mentions
2recommended by
5HN commenters
2019–2026first – last mentioned
40% recommend60% neutral
In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth-century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.
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For those interested in a history of psychiatry, see “Mind Fixers” by Ann Harrington (Harvard historian).
on “The Evolution of Psychiatry” ↗A good book on this is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. Describing the history of how many of these classes of drugs came about is pretty eye opening, I would say the book is pretty nuanced…
on “Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal” ↗I didn't get much past the paywall, but it looks like a book review of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Fixers-Psychiatrys-Troubled-Biol... There are other reviews like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fi... (discussed previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815)
on “Scientific wasteland: recent problems with psychiatry” ↗Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington
on “The Troubled History of Psychiatry” ↗…explore broader works on the mind. I have been listening to audiobooks on animal intelligence ("Other Minds" and "The Genius of Birds") and have made a start on a history of psychology/psychiatry - "The Mind Fixers", which is a bit dry but also filled with wonderful anecdotes and stories.
on “'Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions' (2008)” ↗…early psychologists/psychiatrists to think we were in civilizational decline because so many people would go insane from stage 4. You can read a nuanced and thoughfull take on this idea on page 6 of "The Mind Fixers" which is a pretty academic book about the history of psychiatry. 0. https://xkcd.com/1227/
on “Life before smartphones (2020)” ↗