245. Mental Illness Throughout History feat. Andrew Scull

Psychiatry has been called the stepchild of medicine, experiencing far less progress than care of the body. Andrew Scull, a sociology professor at the University of California at San Diego, chronicles the history of Psychiatry in America in his latest book, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s turbulent quest to cure mental illness. In this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Andrew discuss this history including the rise and rapid fall of asylums, and the procession of remedies that offered false hope to the afflicted. Andrew also shares his research on the pharmaceutical industry and how the reliance on drugs to treat mental illness has grown.
Andrew Scull has written multiple books on the history of psychiatry, including Madness, a very short introduction and Hysteria: The Biography.

[@courtneyleeds]

3:29 - i respectfully disagree, because Liah Greenfeld has spelled out an elegant causal mechanism for major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
56:59 - i agree biology has little-to-nothing to do with mental illness (at least the so-called big three)
1:07:34 - i appreciate the professor using the word "complicated" to describe the current understanding of the big three, because that word is substantially different from the equally pertinent word "complex." And, i would argue that understanding the big three is complex but needn't be complicated (see Greenfeld)
1:11:04 - this part is troubling because, at the aforementioned timestamp, Professor Scull seems in alignment with the claim that biology (aka nature) has little to do with causing the big three, and yet this discussion ends with laughter, which seems to dismiss the possibility that we can compute the area of their metaphorical mental illness rectangle. Again, it seems pretty clear nature plays a negligible role (at least as it pertains to the diagnosis of causation)