Description

The inspiration for the PBS series Mysterious of Mental Illness, Shrinks brilliantly tells the astonishing story of psychiatrys origins, demise, and redemption (Siddhartha Mukherjee).

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining lunatics in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public.

But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for the black sheep of medicine has been anything but smooth.

In Shrinks, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of shrinks to its late blooming maturity beginning after World War II as a science-driven profession that saves lives. With fascinating case studies and portraits of the luminaries of the field from Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel Shrinks is a gripping and illuminating read, and an urgent call-to-arms to dispel the stigma of mental illnesses by treating them as diseases rather than unfortunate states of mind.

A lucid popular historyAt once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come. Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe

Author: Jeffrey A. Lieberman
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Published: 01/05/2016
Pages: 352
Weight: 0.6lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780316278980
Language: English