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

The following is a conversation with Andrew Skull, a historian of psychiatry and mental health. He has authored many books that I highly recommend, including Madness in Civilization, a cultural history of insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, and Desperate Remedies Psychiatrists. turbulent quest to cure mental illness. Andrew Sko has spent decades studying how societies have understood madness, how psychiatry rose to authority, and how often that authority was used with false confidence and catastrophic consequences. In this conversation we trace the long arc from the asylum era to eugenics, from lobotomy and insulin comatherapy to

electroconvulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and the modern crisis of mental health. It is, in part, a story about the terrifying history of bad ideas in medicine, but it is also about the fascinating mystery of the human mind and about the difficult journey. to understand it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors.

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