Shrinks (2015) tells the story of psychiatry’s astonishing development throughout the centuries. These blinks take us on a tour of the discipline’s crude past, its strange and shocking therapies and its great improvements.
Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Ogi Ogas is a computational neuroscientist. A former Fellow of the Homeland Security department, he’s contributed to two successful science books about sex, including A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Ogas, a passionate game show contestant, once won $500,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Upgrade to Premium now and get unlimited access to the Blinkist library. Read or listen to key insights from the world’s best nonfiction.
Upgrade to PremiumThe Blinkist app gives you the key ideas from a bestselling nonfiction book in just 15 minutes. Available in bitesize text and audio, the app makes it easier than ever to find time to read.
Start free trialGet unlimited access to the most important ideas in business, investing, marketing, psychology, politics, and more. Stay ahead of the curve with recommended reading lists curated by experts.
Start free trialShrinks (2015) tells the story of psychiatry’s astonishing development throughout the centuries. These blinks take us on a tour of the discipline’s crude past, its strange and shocking therapies and its great improvements.
Before psychiatric hospitals, life was nothing less than horrifying for those with mental illnesses. While some sufferers were lucky enough to receive care at home, most were destined for a vagrant life on the street. Many others had it worse and were forced to spend their lives in asylums.
In the eighteenth century, asylums were filthy, dark and overcrowded. Inmates were left locked up in tiny cells for weeks, chained, often beaten with sticks and doused with icy water. As if that wasn’t bad enough, patients, like performers in a freak show, were put on public display on Sundays.
Even in better institutions, treatment was still appalling. Patients were subjected to a whole host of primitive medical practices – bloodletting, purging and blistering, to name a few – that were, at the time, standard. Thankfully, a few reformers were determined to change these conditions.
In Europe, physician Philippe Pinel proposed a new, humane treatment of the mentally ill. In 1792, he became head of the Paris Asylum for Insane Men. There, he ended the practice of bleeding and purging patients, and removed their chains.
Emphasizing the importance of clean, pleasant housing, he treated his patients with fairness and created a structured schedule of activities and light manual tasks that they followed each day. The purpose of this schedule was to give back to patients a sense of self-mastery.
In the United States, the physician and humanist Benjamin Rush established a benevolent approach to psychiatry not unlike Pinel’s. Born in 1745, Rush was among the founding fathers of the United States. Few today know that he was also America’s very first modern psychiatrist. Rush also unshackled his patients and forbade the beating of asylum inmates, and lobbied for the improvement of living conditions for psychological inpatients in the state of Pennsylvania.
In the nineteenth century, more and more psychiatrists came to follow the example set by Rush and Pinel. Psychiatry was on its way to becoming a humane practice. Or was it?