A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac

In a way similar to his "From Paralysis to Fatigue" Shorter writes of the evolution of psychiatry from its biological origins in asylums and degenerative brain disorders, to a 50 year "detour" into psychoanalysis, then back to biological origins in psychopharmacology. I found some interesting insights. Neurology in the turn of the century was really the place where mildly neurotic outpatients turned for officebased psychotherapy, and the development of psychoanalysis was critical for breaking the psychiatrist out of the mental hospital into a potentially lucrative practice. The psychoanalysts in this century resisted attempts to diagnose and classify disease, feeling the identification of the psychodynamic was more important. It was interesting to read of events in the 1970's and 1980's, for which I have a real memory, and some participation in the intellectual currents of the time, as history. It makes one question the underpinnings of one's learning to read its discrediting in the history of psychiatry I remember reading Thomas Szasz of the antipsychiatry movement with some approval during medical school, for instance.
Shorter also declares the deinstitutionalization of psychotics as an unmitigated disaster, a sentiment I agree with, and traces its origin to the therapeutic community concept in the military service hospitals in Britain during the second world war. ( )

Excellently researched, compassionate without the melodrama of cries of abuse - (though there was abuse, but sometimes you just want the history) ( )