What do lunatic asylums, lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy have in common? They were all desperate attempts to cure mental illness. Long before the advent of pharmacology, "maverick" psychiatrists proposed different theories on what caused madness - from germs and infections to abnormal pathways in the brain.
These ideas gave birth to a host of horrific "cures" that often left the patients worse off than before... if they managed to survive them in the first place.
In his acclaimed book Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness, historian of medicine Prof. Andrew Scull traces the turbulent past of this new medical science that spurned on some of the most well known horror cliches ever...
In this haunting conversation, we talk about this dark history, but also about Freudian psychoanalysis, the wartime birth of psychotherapy and the poor state of psychiatric care today.
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