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. When Eisenberg entered psychiatry it was a brainless psychiatry, and when he was leaving it, it was a mindless psychiatry. The line sums up how the field has largely moved, and how important insights were lost even while other things were gained.

Freudians neglected the biological and worked from a psychological model of how minds work, treating the brain as an organism psychiatry did not need to worry about. Some of his psychiatrist friends grasp that the field has to meet in the middle. The middle got lost in enthusiasm for neuroscience. Antipsychotic drugs discovered in the early 1950s worked with no clue how. Asking what the drugs did showed the brain was not only electrical signals, the picture from the first half of the 20th century and before, but a chemical soup of neurotransmitters that helped the brain work. Whether the soup explained why the brain went awry stays open. The first neuroscience conventions were in the 1970s and drew a few hundred people. Tens of thousands of neuroscientists now make neuroscience a huge enterprise. Diagnosis has come under threat, and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depression, categories treated as real diseases, are beginning to falter.