Did Andrew Scull Write Desperate Remedies Right Away?

Andrew Scull did not write Desperate Remedies right away. He worked on it piecemeal over the years and ended up with a much more comprehensive look at psychiatry, from its origins to now. He could not have written the book back then. An earlier version would have missed the developments from 1980 onward, which are very important to the overall picture. He finished it 40 years later, in 2022.

He has written a lot of books. He thinks keeping at least two projects going at once is part of how he stayed productive and interested. He cannot write two things at the same time. He works on one, and when he gets tired of it he picks up the other for a bit, then goes back. While one project is the main focus, the other keeps percolating. When he comes across something relevant, he makes a note and returns to it later.

When he finally wrote Desperate Remedies, he had been thinking about the issues for 40 years. He thinks the wait made a big difference to how he approached things and to what he thought. Over 40 years a writer either says the same thing over and over, or learns new things, broadens what he knows, and thinks differently once he realizes he had not grasped the full complexity of the subject.