Described as „unsparing” by The New York Times, Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry's quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here.
In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington explores psychiatry's struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. Harrington shows how little the biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry's waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab but also by a surprising range of social factors. Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future.