A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac [Paperback]

Edward Shorter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0471245313 | ISBN-13: 978-0471245315 | Edition: 1

"PPPP . . . To compress 200 years of psychiatric theory and practice into a compelling and coherent narrative is a fine achievement . . . . What strikes the reader [most] are Shorter's storytelling skills, his ability to conjure up the personalities of the psychiatrists who shaped the discipline and the conditions under which they and their patients lived."--Ray Monk The Mail on Sunday magazine, U.K.

"An opinionated, anecdote-rich history. . . . While psychiatrists may quibble, and Freudians and other psychoanalysts will surely squawk, those without a vested interest will be thoroughly entertained and certainly enlightened."--Kirkus Reviews.

"Shorter tells his story with immense panache, narrative clarity, and genuinely deep erudition."--Roy Porter Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

In A History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter shows us the harsh, farcical, and inspiring realities of society's changing attitudes toward and attempts to deal with its mentally ill and the efforts of generations of scientists and physicians to ease their suffering. He paints vivid portraits of psychiatry's leading historical figures and pulls no punches in assessing their roles in advancing or sidetracking our understanding of the origins of mental illness.

Shorter also identifies the scientific and cultural factors that shaped the development of psychiatry. He reveals the forces behind the unparalleled sophistication of psychiatry in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the emergence of the United States as the world capital of psychoanalysis.

This engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and fiercely partisan account is compelling reading for anyone with a personal, intellectual, or professional interest in psychiatry.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The history of madness and its treatment is a fascinating one. At one time, the mentally ill were diagnosed as demonically possessed; later, when mental illness became the province of psychoanalysts, those conditions that are actually physical in nature, such as schizophrenia or manic depression, went insufficiently treated, their sufferers consigned to asylums. In his book, A History of Psychiatry, Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, presents a concise chronology of mental illness and its treatment. Shorter favors a biological understanding of these disorders, concentrating on medical approaches to helping the seriously mentally ill. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Shorter cites recent research indicating that adult-onset schizophrenia is genetically influenced and often traceable to uterine trauma or difficult birth. In his view, brain biology and genetics underlie much mental illness, and biological psychiatry-combining drugs with psychotherapy-has replaced Freudian psychoanalysis as the dominant paradigm for explaining and treating a host of disorders. In this richly informative, iconoclastic, sure-to-be-controversial chronicle, Shorter, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Toronto, argues that Freud, by turning psychoanalysis into a movement instead of a method of objective inquiry, fostered a stifling orthodoxy, therapists' arrogance toward patients and scientific stagnation. He defends electroshock as a valuable tool in the treatment of depression; identifies German physician Emil Kraepelin, systematizer of diagnoses-rather than Freud-as the central figure in the history of psychiatry; and dismisses as unhistorical nonsense Michel Foucault's theory that psychiatry arose in a collusion between capitalism and the state as a means to control deviant individuals. While this study won't end the nature-versus-nurture debate, it mounts a formidable challenge to strict adherents of the talking therapies. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 3, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471245313
• ISBN-13: 978-0471245315
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #322,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mind Medicine -- Psychic or Somatic, November 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (Paperback)

Shorter's book is an important addition to the history of psychiatry. It falls short because of Shorter's "over kill" in his polemic against psychoanalysis. The Freudian perspective needs thoughtful criticism, but Shorter's attacks become carping. Psychoanalysis has made important cultural contributions, and many people have received benefit from the analyst's couch. Good history should have a direction, even a perspective. But Shorter's history would have been better served with a calmer and more balanced voice.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent account of psychiatry in a single volume, February 9, 2011

By 

Sagar Jethani (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (Paperback)

Shorter does a remarkable job compressing over 200 years of medical history into a single, readable volume. Rather than attempting to provide the reader with an exhaustive chronology of psychiatry, Shorter tells a story which weaves seamlessly between intellectual movements, popular culture, and advances in drug therapy. The principle which guides this narrative-- and, indeed, psychiatry overall-- is the humanitarian impulse to help those who suffer from mental illness.

What I found most surprising was the degree to which Freudian psychoanalysis has become thoroughly discredited:

"All sciences have to pass through an ordeal by quackery," observed Hans Eysenck in 1985. "Chemistry had to slough off the fetters of alchemy, the brain sciences had to disengage themselves from the tenets of phrenology... Psychology and psychiatry, too will have to abandon the pseudo-science of psychoanalysis..."

Far from taking psychological care down an aimless garden path, Freudian analysis is shown to have done real harm to those who suffer from psychological maladies by denying them other forms of care beyond the analyst's couch-- including drug therapy --which could have led to real improvement in patient's lives.

Shorter's account begins with the early days of organized asylums, institutions which, despite today's negative associations with the word, were staffed by people who sought to bring relief to those who would have otherwise languished tied to wooden posts or locked in a room for years. The great failings of the asylum system resulted not from its intentions, but from an overwhelming crush of intake. An exponential increase in asylum patients led to substandard care and occasional depictions of gross negligence-- and these latter images are those most strongly associated today with the era, despite their relative infrequency.

After the second world war, psychoanalysts in America insisted that mental problems could be cured by means of obtaining a deeper understanding of the primal drives which govern human action. It rejected other forms of treatment as purely palliative, and suggested that real treatment involved a self-discovery of the patient's unresolved psychosexual impulses. (This, despite significant evidence that patients undergoing psychotherapy actually experienced longer recovery periods than patients with similar conditions who received alternate forms of treatment.)

Finally, advances in psychopharmacology in the last three decades of the twentieth century succeeded in dethroning Freud from the pinnacle of psychological care and allowed psychiatry to plant itself on firmer, scientific ground. New insights into the genetic origins of many forms of mental illness dispelled the notion that personal insight alone could lead to a full recovery in the majority of cases. The identification of specific drug treatments allowed many to live happy, public lives who would have earlier suffered lonliness and marginalization in the era of asylums.

'A History of Psychiatry' is an excellent study of the major movements within psychiatric care over the past three centuries. Shorter has contributed a highly-readable story of a subject which, in less capable hands, would have been an unwieldy account.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac, December 18, 2007

By 

S Rose "Steve" (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (Paperback)

Excellent, well written and researched historic account of the history of psychiatry during this period. Well worth reading for everyone interested in mental health care.