Brain Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to comprehend the biological basis of mental disease and asks where we need to move from here.

In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, writer of The Treatment Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical conditions. She shows the way the stalling of early twentieth hundred years efforts with this path allowed Freudians and social scientists to demand, with some justification, that that they had better ways of about Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Stressed Seek out the Biology of Mental Disease analyzing and repairing minds.

But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry right into a condition of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was designed to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological trend had to do with breakthroughs in research, and why the field offers fallen right into a state of crisis in our own time.

Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have already been shaped not only by advancements in the clinic and laboratory, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about competition and gender. Federal government programs made to bare the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, sector revenue mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the tale as well.

In focusing particularly on the seek out the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high individual stakes for the thousands of people who have wanted medical answers because of their mental suffering. This is not just a tale about doctors and researchers, but about countless normal people and themselves.

A clear-eyed, evenhanded, yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present battle to help to make mental illness a biological issue in order to place the groundwork for creating an improved future, both for individuals who suffer and for all those whose job it really is to care for them.