The history of Western psychiatry has been troubled and tragic. Psychiatric knowledge remains riddled with gaps where one would expect to find explanations of the underlying mechanisms of mental distress. Instead of inducing professional humility, this persisting ignorance often has been met with hubris on the part of psychiatrists. The hubris has spawned wanton experimentation, callous disregard, and aggressive “treatments”—most infamously, lobotomy and electroconvulsive therapy. In short, psychiatric history abounds with hard lessons about what should not be done to ameliorate mental distress.
Within this dark history of snake pits and ice picks, however, reside counter- histories of alternative ideas, of roads less traveled that may lead to saner destinations. After all, a profession so prone to experimentation is bound to hit on something, sometime. (A broken clock is correct twice a day, right?) Excavating these promising ideas could help us get beyond the paralysis in our contemporary debates, which...
