Snake Pits, Talking Cures, & Magic Bullets: A History of Mental Illness

by Deborah Kent

Looks at how the mentally ill have been treated throughout history, focusing on advances made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding mental hospitals, medications, and social acceptance.

Genres: Mental Illness, History, Psychology, Mental Health

160 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Deborah Kent was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Little Falls. She graduated from Oberlin College and received a master's degree from Smith College School for Social Work. For four years, she was a social worker at University Settlement House on New York's Lower East Side. In 1975, Ms. Kent moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she wrote her first young-adult novel, Belonging. In San Miguel, Ms. Kent helped to found the Centro de Crecimiento, a school for children with disabilities. Ms. Kent is the author of numerous young-adult novels and nonfiction titles for children. She lives in Chicago with her husband, children's author R. Conrad Stein, and their daughter, Janna.

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a general theme, I might put the history of mental illness this way: “We now know that _________ treatment was inappropriate and ineffective during the _____ century .” And then repeat that countless times throughout history. Then, 50 years from now, we will probably say, “We now know that treatment in the early 2000s was inappropriate and ineffective.”

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A straightforward, well-researched and compelling, yet thoroughly depressing account of Western civilization's attempts to deal with madness throughout history. If there is any moral to this story, it's that none of the treatments really work all that well, and we still have a long way to go towards curing mental illness and ending the stigma associated with it.

[Jason Schmidt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having been published in 2003, I was worried that Deborah Kent’s look at the history of the perception of and treatment of mental illness would feel disconnected with the time gap of 23 year (as it is presently 2026); sadly, this turned out to be completely an unfounded worry. Kent does a wonderful job, giving readers a fairly detailed overview of the evolution of the diagnosis and treatment, but this book is not written to be an in detail analysis of each of those points of evolution in the fields of medicine and psychology. This is a book for the layperson who is interested in having a more workmanlike grasp of the content, and it serves a great jumping off point for further research.

The reason that I said it was sad that a book published 23 years ago doesn’t feel dated is because I might argue that there haven’t been the developmental leaps in the way that we look at the treatment of mental health that happened up to the early 2000s. I might argue that most of the shifts now have been more superficial, and perhaps, even a step back from some of the progress that has been made in the past.