The history of mental illness has been the target of many scholarly works. Michel Foucault’s 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is a notorious example, and the one that Andrew Scull paraphrases to title his 2015 Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine. In that well-received global history of humanity’s encounters with unreason, Scull elaborates on this proposal for a culturally systematic ostracism of that shunned other, ‘the mad’, an argument that he picks up in Psychiatry and its Discontents (2019). In this new volume, Scull collects a series of 16 essays that take the reader on a hopscotch journey across the history of psychiatry, from a systematic evisceration of Foucault’s 1961 work to the taxonomic vicissitudes and shortcomings of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Scull presents a patchy but solid case for a profession in need of profound reinvention — as he bluntly puts it, “an approach on the brink of collapse”. The biological turn of psychiatry has much to offer. As Scull suggests, however, this is a turn that has still not turned up.
