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Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head - Boston Review

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Decades of biological research haven’t improved diagnosis or treatment. We should look to society, not to the brain. Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness Anne Harrington W. W. Norton, $17.95 (paper) Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness Andrew Scull Harvard University Press, $35 (cloth) In 1990 President George Bush announced that “a new era of discovery” was “dawning in brain research.” Over the next several decades the U.S. government poured billions of dollars into science that promised to revolutionize our understanding of psychiatric disorders, from depression and bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. Scientists imagined that mental illnesses in the future might be diagnosed with genetic tests, a simple blood draw, or perhaps a scan of your brain. New pharmaceuticals would target specific neurochemical imbalances, resulting in more effective treatments. The 1990s, Bush declared, would be remembered as “The Decad

May 17, 2022 Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness Anne Harrington W. W. Norton, $17.95 (paper) Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness Andrew Scull Harvard University Press, $35 (cloth) In 1990 President George Bush announced that “a new era of discovery” was “dawning in brain research.” Over the next several decades the U.S. government poured billions of dollars into science that promised to revolutionize our understanding of psychiatric disorders, from depression and bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. Scientists imagined

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