REVIEWED BY PETER BARGLOW, MD
W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 384 pp. $27.95. ISBN 13: 978-0393071221
INMIND FIXERS: PSYCHIATRY’S TROUBLED Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,1 Harvard historian of science Anne Harrington concludes about American psychiatry that “firm understandings of major mental illnesses and their underlying biology continue to elude the field” (p.272). Harrington cites hundreds of published articles and books demonstrating her major conclusion that the biology of serious mental disease remains a mystery. Such a pessimistic verdict is paired with the implication that treatment of emotional disease has shown little progress, largely as a consequence of inadequate biological comprehension. In Chapter 1, Harrington describes questionable early-20th century psychologically based treatment efforts for hysteria and traumatic psychic war disability. In 1913, Treponema pallidum bacteria that caused syphilis were found in the brains of patients suffering from the neurological psychiatric disease “general paresis.” Later antibiotic remedies that destroyed Treponema also ended neurosyphilis. Surely, one would think, the same kind of scientific advance could generate a cure for schizophrenia or depression? Alas, this has not happened even by today.