Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness

A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction
A Telegraph Book of the Year

A sweeping history of American psychiatry—from the mental hospital to the brain lab—that reveals the devastating treatments doctors have inflicted on their patients (especially women) in the name of science and questions our massive reliance on meds.

For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind—the sorts of things that were once called “madness”—have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental...