And I think then what happened is that ... as an alternative [to asylums], people sought treatments. But the treatments turned out to be, in retrospect, pretty barbaric. And it's only really been in the last 50 years that psychiatry has established a scientific foundation for itself and developed treatments that truly work beyond a shadow of a doubt and are safe.
On Sigmund Freud's contributions to psychiatry and what he got wrong
Freud is undisputedly a towering figure and the most famous person in the history of psychiatry. And in the absence of any scientific theory of mental illness, he introduced concepts that were completely novel to civilization and endure today as valid and have really been given new life in the context of cognitive neuroscience. ...
I think his biggest mistake was that he was a very strict controller of how the theory was handled by his disciples. In other words, he permitted no deviation or modification of his theory or methods, and he didn't encourage any research to empirically validate his theory. So basically people that followed him and embraced this theory had to take it on faith.
i
In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude." Henry Burroughs/AP hide caption
itoggle caption Henry Burroughs/AP
In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude."
Henry Burroughs/AP
On psychiatrists going back and forth as to whether mental disorders are inherited
It's long been known that specific mental illnesses tend to run in families. But then, you know, the notion of this being kind of a Mendelian type of genetic condition was really not accurate. And if you looked at a family pedigree, you could see that schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, depression, autism often skipped generations in families or would occur in families that had no other biologic relative. So the mystery of the genetics of mental illness was really much more complicated than ever imagined and it's only recently started to be solved.
On whether the future of psychiatry is in the medicine chest
Not solely, no. And this is something that is commonly, I think, misunderstood. The cornerstone of the healing profession and the physician is the patient relationship. ... So medications were extraordinarily important — they were miraculous developments — but medications alone can't do it.
On why he wrote the book
In order for us to genuinely make a case for why psychiatry is a medical discipline that deserves sort of equal footing and respect as other medical specialties, we needed to fess up in terms of what the past was. And so in order to do so, we needed to tell the unvarnished history of the field and then describe why things may not have been helpful — and [in] some cases harmful — then [and] why that's different now. And nobody should avoid seeking treatment if they think they need it because of uncertainty or fear.
Related NPR Stories
Author Interviews
'Shrink Rap' Gets Psychiatry Up Off The Couch
Mental Health
A Psychiatrist's Prescription For His Profession
mental health
Doctors