CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES AND DAILY TELEGRAPHSHORTLISTED FOR THE HUGHES PRIZE'A riveting chronicle of faulty science, false promises, arrogance, greed, and shocking disregard for the wellbeing of patients suffering from mental disorders. An eloquent, meticulously documented, clear-eyed call for change' Dirk WittenbornIn this masterful work, Andrew Scull, one of the most prov...

A Telegraph Book of the YearA Washington Post Notable WorkA Times Book of the YearA Hughes Award Finalist“An indisputable masterpiece…comprehensive, fascinating, and persuasive.”—Wall Street Journal“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 f...

The nineteenth century seems to have been full of hysterical women - or so they were diagnosed. Where are they now? The very disease no longer exists. In this fascinating account, Andrew Scull tells the story of Hysteria - an illness that disappeared not through medical endeavour, but through growing understanding and cultural change. More generally, it raises the question of how diseases are framed, and how conceptions of a disease change through history. The lurid history of hysteria mak...

Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all. It is a word with which we are universally familiar, and a condition that haunts the human imagination. Through the centuries, in poetry and in prose, in drama and in the visual arts, its depredations are on display for all to see. A whole industry has grown up, devoted to its management and suppression. Madness profoundly disturbs our common sense assumptions; threatens the social order, both symbolically and practically; creates ...

Written by one of the world’s most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm's decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book's historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age o...

The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the common-sense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that can seize hold of some of us: these are a part of our shared human experience whatever culture we come from. Nowadays, mental disturbance is most commonly (though not always) viewed through a medical lens, but human beings have also always sought to make sense of the depredations of madness through invocations of the religious and the supernatural, ...

Neste Loucura na civilização: uma história cultural da insanidade, o sociólogo britânico Andrew Scull condensa mais de quatro décadas de pesquisas sobre a história da loucura, da medicina e da psiquiatria. Percorrendo diversos pontos do globo, com destaque para a América do Norte e a Europa, o autor vai do mundo antigo à contemporaneidade, revelando como diferentes culturas interpretaram e lidaram com a irracionalidade humana no decorrer dos séculos. O surgimento e a expansão dos ...

This compelling book brings together many of the major papers published by Andrew Scull in the history of psychiatry over the past decade and a half.Examining some of the major substantive debates in the field from the eighteenth century to the present, the historiographic essays provide a critical perspective on such major figures as Michel Foucault, Roy Porter and Edward Shorter.Chapters on psychiatric therapeutics and on the shifting social responses to madness over a pe...

Brought to you by Penguin.For more than two hundred years, disturbances of reason, cognition and emotion - the sort of things that were once called 'madness' - have been described and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, it is said, is an illness like any other - a disorder that can treated by doctors, whose suffering can be eased, and from which patients can return. And yet serious mental illness remains a profound mystery that is in some ways no clo...

Social Order/Mental Disorder represents a provocative and exciting exploration of social response to madness in England and the United States from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scull, who is well-known for his previous work in this area, examines a range of issues, including the changing social meanings of madness, the emergence and consolidation of the psychiatric profession, the often troubled relationship between psychiatry and the law, the linkages between se...

For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind—the sorts of things that were once called "madness"—have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, whose origins can be identified and from which one can be cured. But is this true?In this masterful account of America's quest to understand and treat everything from anxiety to psychosis, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today shed...

心理諮商、創傷研究……雨後春筍的心理學都起源於百年前對歇斯底里的研究◎當代精神醫學史權威，繼《瘋癲文明史》又一力作◎本書作者因對醫學史的終身貢獻榮獲羅伊•波特獎章、埃里克•卡爾森獎心理諮商已成為許多現代人的需求，創傷研究、心理治療也為人提供許多幫助。但你知道嗎？現代心理諮商與治療，其實起自佛洛伊德對「歇斯底里」的研究。而歇斯底里在人類歷史上其實已存在了2000年，卻在佛洛伊德辨識出它的「真貌」後，於20世紀淡出醫學的舞台……最怪異、歷時悠久的疾病……起自於子宮的原罪有人說歇斯底里的出現，是因為魔鬼附身或女巫詛咒，但也有人從古希臘以降的體液說，論證都是子宮惹的禍。這些歐洲社會上出現的歇斯底里「瘋女人」，讓婦科醫生束手無策。為了治療據稱因為「性慾高漲」而引發的疾病，各種殘忍不合理的治療方式被發明出來：摘除子宮、切除陰蒂……但不論手段如何極端，歇斯底里依舊無從解決，眾人也依然對它一知半解。17世紀起有人試圖從「神經系統」去理解「歇斯底里」，但也有人會認為這些都只是騙人的伎倆，病人只是在裝瘋賣...