The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished sociologist and scholar of psychiatry. He comes across as wise, sanguine and unsurprised by his findings in this survey of how American – for which also read British – psychiatry has understood and treated the insane, distressed and traumatised from 1820 to the present. His book, however, will leave readers who are unfamiliar with the story horrified and aghast. Since my own breakdown and sectioning in early 2019 I have been working with sufferers, social workers and psychiatrists on improving the understanding and treatment of mental distress. Members of the Critical Psychiatry Network have struck me as particularly troubled by current psychiatric practice, and having read this book, I understand why.

The history of psychiatry is a catalogue of disastrous mistreatment. Accounts of induced comas, electric shocks, chemical straitjackets, lobotomies, brutal incarceration, injustice and cruelty on an industrial scale, and all disproportionately visited on women and black people, make appalling reading.