Smash Notes

Back to #502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung, with Andrew Scull.

How Much Progress Has Psychiatry Made?

Andrew Scull says there is no question that psychiatry has made some limited progress over at least the last three-quarters of a century in dealing with the problems mental illness creates. Some of the progress is confined to milder forms of mental distress. Serious forms of psychosis and the breakdown of emotional control have also seen some progress, but it is easy to overstate how much progress has occurred on serious psychosis and the breakdown of emotional control.

Psychiatry tries to deal with an enormously complicated thing: the human mind, human emotions, and the human ability to attempt to understand the world. The profession focuses on people where the common-sense approach to the world seems to break down. Emotional life is filled with turmoil, the ability to relate to others is badly damaged, and people see things the rest of us simply think are not there: illusions, hallucinations, and delusions. Clever minds have worked on mental illness for years.

Grokipedia·Andrew Scull

Transcript

#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung ·

Lex Fridman Podcast

More from this episode

  1. What Is Mindless Psychiatry?Andrew Scull calls mindless psychiatry the field Leon Eisenberg found at the end of a long Harvard career that began in brainless psychiatry.
  2. How Much Earlier Do People With Serious Mental Illness Die?Andrew Scull says a person with serious mental illness will die on average 15 to 25 years before everyone else, and the gap has been growing rather than…
  3. When Did Neurosis and Psychosis Swap Meanings?Andrew Scull says neurosis and psychosis crossed over sometime in the late nineteenth century.
  4. Did Early Asylums Do Good Work?Andrew Scull believes the early asylums did good work and that some patients recovered during their stays. They were not discharging 80% of their patients.
  5. Who Were the First Victims of the Nazi Final Solution?Andrew Scull says the mentally ill were the first people to suffer the Nazi Final Solution, that the gas chamber and the disguise of gas chambers as showers…
  6. How Did Ice Pick Lobotomies Fade in America?Andrew Scull says ice pick lobotomies in America died away through generational change, and he is sure the Nobel Prize in medicine that Moniz won in 1949 for…
  7. How Does Syphilis Damage the Brain?Andrew Scull says syphilis damages the brain in its tertiary stage, when the organism that causes syphilis resides in the brains of people suffering from GPI.
  8. Why Was Malaria Used to Treat Syphilis?Andrew Scull says doctors infected asylum patients with malaria because general paralysis of the insane, the tertiary stage of syphilis, was invariably fatal…
  9. What Is Insulin Coma Therapy?Andrew Scull says insulin coma therapy put people with schizophrenia into comas with extra insulin.
  10. Why Is Electroconvulsive Therapy Still Controversial?Andrew Scull says electroconvulsive therapy is still controversial because it only eases severe depression for a time, can damage memory, and draws legal…
  11. Are Ketamine and Psychedelics a Miracle Cure for Depression?Andrew Scull says ketamine and psychedelics are being put forward as a miracle cure for depression, and the evidence for that claim is enormously weak.
  12. How Did World War Two Change American Psychiatry?Andrew Scull says American psychiatric casualties among the troops in World War II were two to three times as high as in World War I.
  13. Was Electroconvulsive Therapy Used as Discipline?Andrew Scull says electroconvulsive therapy was used in the 1950s and 1960s as a tool of discipline in the hospitals.
  14. Why Does Electroconvulsive Therapy Still Get Used?Andrew Scull says electroconvulsive therapy still gets used because patients on the brink of suicide, with long-running depressions, have described it as…
  15. Did Andrew Scull Write Desperate Remedies Right Away?Andrew Scull did not write Desperate Remedies right away.
  16. When Did Neurology Emerge in America?Andrew Scull says neurology emerged in America after the Civil War.
  17. Why Did Freud and Jung Split?Andrew Scull says Carl Jung was anointed the crown prince who was supposed to inherit psychoanalysis, then the two men had a serious falling out in 1913 and…
  18. Who Was Anna O in Psychoanalysis?Andrew Scull says Anna O was the foundation patient of psychoanalysis, and she was Joseph Breuer's patient, not Sigmund Freud's.
  19. How Many Psychoanalysts Were in North America Around 1930?Andrew Scull says North America had probably 300 psychoanalysts around 1930.
  20. Did Screening Recruits Stop Shell Shock After Pearl Harbor?Andrew Scull says psychiatric screening before America entered the war failed because the breakdowns came back after psychiatrists removed the recruits they…
  21. How Strong Is the Evidence for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?Andrew Scull says the evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy works in cases of schizophrenia is pretty poor.
  22. Why Weren't Drugs Used to Treat Mental Illness?Andrew Scull says hardly anybody had conceived of using drugs to treat mental illness.
  23. How Was Chlorpromazine First Tested?Andrew Scull says chlorpromazine was first tested by handing the drug to doctors with no controls and asking them to see whether it worked.
  24. Were Newer Antipsychotic Drugs More Effective?Andrew Scull says a 2005 National Institutes of Mental Health study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that newer antipsychotic drugs…
  25. How Did Prozac Arrive by Accident?Andrew Scull says the second generation of antidepressants, Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, arrived by accident.
  26. Why Does England Recommend Therapy Before Antidepressants?Andrew Scull says the picture with psychiatric drugs is mixed, which is why groups like NICE in England recommend CBT as the first treatment, not drugs.
  27. Have Drug Companies Quit Mental Illness Research?Andrew Scull says major drug companies have abandoned research on serious mental illness.
  28. What Is Andrew Scull's Hope for Psychiatry?Andrew Scull says a real hope for psychiatry is that it can actually help people who suffer.

People

More answers like this

More with Lex Fridman

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.