Desperate Remedies

A Telegraph Book of the Year

A Washington Post Notable Work

A Times Book of the Year

A Hughes Award Finalist "An indisputable masterpiece...comprehensive, fascinating, and persuasive."

--Wall Street Journal "Compulsively readable...Scull has joined his wide-ranging reporting and research with a humane perspective on matters that many of us continue to look away from."

--Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic "I would recommend this fascinating, alarming and alerting book to anybody. For anyone referred to a psychiatrist it is surely essential."

--The Spectator "Meticulously researched and beautifully written, and even funny at times."

--The Guardian "Brimming with wisdom and brio, this masterful work spans the history of psychiatry. Exceedingly well-researched, wide-ranging, provocative in its conclusions, and magically compact, it is riveting from start to finish. Mark my words, Desperate Remedies will soon be a classic."

--Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire From the birth of the asylum to the latest drug trials, Desperate Remedies brings together a galaxy of mind doctors working in and out of institutional settings: psychologists and psychoanalysts, neuroscientists and cognitive behavioral therapists, as well as patients and their families desperate for relief. One of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today, Andrew Scull carefully reconstructs the rise and fall of state-run mental hospitals to explain why so many of the mentally ill are now on the street, and why victims of experimental therapies were so often women. He reveals how drug companies expanded their reach to treat a growing catalog of ills, while deliberately concealing the side effects of drugs now routinely prescribed from childhood through senescence. Carefully researched and compulsively readable, this passionate and compassionate account of America's long battle with mental illness challenges us to rethink our deepest assumptions about how we think and feel.