Fools and Frauds: How Modern Psychiatry Fumbled the Origins of Mental Illness

by Dan Agin

Typical reading 5 hours. An account of the early modern history of psychiatry and how the origins of mental illness were fumbled by ignorance and arrogance. Maybe the most significant aspect of the history of modern psychiatry treated in this book is the profound resistance of psychiatry and psychiatrists to biological science and neuroscience during the period 1750 to 1950. The origin of this resistance was the unfortunate and archaic intellectual attitude that the human mind is something apart from human biology and has its own rules and causes. This book should help some people understand why the medical history of mental illness has been such a slow and awful slog--and how modern psychiatry in its early history fumbled the origins of mental illness with often tragic consequences.

238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 19, 2011