"On a two-mile stretch of land in New York's East River, a 19th-century horror story was unfolding ... Today we call it Roosevelt Island. Then, it was Blackwell's, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals. Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, Blackwell's Island quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, 'a lounging, listless madhouse.' In the first...

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness -- how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other people -- sane, well-adjusted members of society -- went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all eight emerged...

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, reveals, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth. Here, 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...

In an effort to enlighten a new generation about its growing reliance on psychiatry, Cracked investigates why psychiatry has become the fastest-growing medical field in history; why psychiatric drugs are now more widely prescribed than ever before; and why psychiatry keeps expanding the number of mental disorders it believes to exist. This revelatory volume shows that these issues can be explained by one startling fact: in recent decades psychiatry...

"Every part of your body affects every other part of your body, and if any one area is not functioning properly, other systems will feel it, too. There is a fundamental connection between the brain, the gut, the microbiome, and the thyroid -- which Dr Raphael Kellman calls 'the whole brain'. In this ... he reveals how this system works to keep us healthy, and how, by making small changes, we can use it to heal mood and mental disorders without drugs....

"We cannot know how to fix a problem until we understand its causes. But even for some of the most common mental health problems, specialists argue over whether the answers lie in the person's biology, their psychology or their circumstances. As a cognitive neuropsychiatrist, Anthony David brings together many fields of enquiry, from social and cognitive psychology to neurology. The key for each patient might be anything from a traumatic memory to...

Adam has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He sees and hears people who aren't there: Rebecca, a beautiful girl who understands him; the Mob Boss, who harasses him; and Jason, the naked guy who’s unfailingly polite. It should be easy to separate the real from the not real, but Adam can't. Still, there’s hope. As Adam starts fresh at a new school, he begins a drug trial that helps him ignore his visions. Suddenly everything seems...

"In the early 1960s, JFK declared that science would take us to the moon. He also declared that science would make the "remote reaches of the mind accessible" and cure psychiatric illness with breakthrough medications. We were walking on the moon within the decade. But today, psychiatric cures continue to elude us-as does the mind itself. Why is it that we still don't understand how the mind works? What is the difference between the mind and the brain?...