Shrinks

The inspiration for the PBS series Mysterious of Mental Illness, this history book presents psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption.

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining “lunatics” in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for “the black sheep of medicine” has been anything but smooth.

In Shrinks, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of “shrinks” to its late blooming maturity—beginning after World War II—as a science-driven profession that saves lives. With fascinating case studies and portraits of the luminaries of the field—from Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel—Shrinks is a gripping and illuminating read, and an urgent call-to-arms to dispel the stigma of mental illnesses by treating them as diseases rather than unfortunate states of mind.

“An astonishing book: honest, sober, exciting, and humane. Lieberman writes with the authority of an expert, but with the humility of a doctor who has learned to treat the most profound and mysterious forms of mental illnesses. . . . This book brings you to the very forefront of one of the most amazing medical journeys of our time.” -New York Times–bestselling author Siddhartha Mukherjee

“A lucid popular history . . . At once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come.” —Boston Globe