In her new book, Anne Harrington sews a comprehensive thread across psychiatry’s problematic backdrop. The first attempts at biological psychiatry in the late 19th century, the birth and hegemony of psychoanalysis and the failed promise of the modern ‘biological revolution’ in psychiatry via psychopharmacology and the brain sciences; so, Harrington contends — all false starts of psychiatry are pulled apart and scrutinized and Harrington takes no prisoners. The end of this tale finds no solace in psychiatry’s search for the biology behind mental illness. The abandonment of psychiatric research by the pharmaceutical industry and the vicissitudes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) bring Harrington to her conclusion of a psychiatric establishment in chronic crisis, an open wound that this American-centric history virtuosically drives home. Albeit solidly researched, Mind Fixers still seems to confuse biological bases with biological causes of mental illness, disregarding that inasmuch as mental illness must be grounded in biology, its causes and triggers may be variously found in that liminal space between one’s environment and brain circuits. Mind Fixers, as psychiatric researchers were once known, may be dancing in the dark. But if not in its neurobiological reality, where may answers be found?
