Mind Fixers
In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth-century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2019–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A good book on this is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. Describing the history of how many of these classes of drugs came about is pretty eye opening, I would say the book is pretty nuanced in its conclusions.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180010-mind-fixers
The title is a play on the Pulitzer prize winning article from the 80's.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041125092022/http://www.byline...
- For those interested in a history of psychiatry, see “Mind Fixers” by Ann Harrington (Harvard historian).
- There is of course a classic xkcd about this [0]. I think these help a little with perspective. But my favourite is the rise in syphilis cases leading early psychologists/psychiatrists to think we were in civilizational decline because so many people would go insane from stage 4. You can read a nuanced and thoughfull take on this idea on page 6 of "The Mind Fixers" which is a pretty academic book about the history of psychiatry.
- Although I've read this before, its nice to re-read this now that I have started to pay a bit more attention to theory of mind. I don't have much to offer here except some resources for further exploration. Currently I am reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" which explores related ideas to what Wallace is getting at here but with the rigour of psychology (for all the caveats that come with that).
You could also try Sam Harris' "waking up" app which claims to achieve what is talked about in Wallace's essay through meditation. From my dabbling with it, it is somewhat true if not entirely true.
Finally you could explore broader works on the mind. I have been listening to audiobooks on animal intelligence ("Other Minds" and "The Genius of Birds") and have made a start on a history of psychology/psychiatry - "The Mind Fixers", which is a bit dry but also filled with wonderful anecdotes and stories.
- I didn't get much past the paywall, but it looks like a book review of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Fixers-Psychiatrys-Troubled-Biol...
There are other reviews like https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/mind-fi... (discussed previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435815)
- Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington
