{"product":{"product_id":"1538715287","title":"The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness","price":"11.79","image_url":"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51OYEZZ8qML._SL500_.jpg","url":"https://www.amazon.com/dp/1538715287"},"comments":[{"body":"Read this book!![link to the book on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Great-Pretender-Undercover-Mission-Understanding/dp/1538715287)","subreddit_name":"bipolar","author":"sexysungoddess"},{"body":"If anyone is interested please read The Great Pretender ([https://www.amazon.com/Great-Pretender-Undercover-Mission-Understanding/dp/1538715287](https://www.amazon.com/Great-Pretender-Undercover-Mission-Understanding/dp/1538715287))\r\n\r\nThe author gives a detailed history of psychiatry.  Here's some select quotes:\r\n\r\n\u0026gt;Throw a rock into a crowd in the late 1800s, and there’s a good chance you’d hit someone who had spent some time in an asylum. And, for those who did end up committed, odds weren’t great that they would make it out intact. Once declared insane, you could permanently lose custody of your children, property, and rights to inheritance. Many would remain locked away for a long time, if not the rest of their lives. Those who pushed back often were beaten or “treated” with bleeding, leeching, enemas, and induced bouts of intense vomiting (which were key parts of general medicine’s arsenal of care at the time). A substantial portion of people admitted to psychiatric hospitals in this period died within months, even weeks, of being admitted—though there is no definitive proof whether this is because they really suffered from misdiagnosed life-threatening medical conditions or whether the hospitals’ conditions themselves led to an early end, or if it was a combination of the two. The malleability of the era’s definitions of insanity meant that any man of a certain means and pedigree could just pay off a doctor or two and dispatch whomever he wanted gone, a disobedient wife, for example, or an inconvenient relative. This understandably bred a widespread anxiety over false diagnoses. Newspapers stoked this fear by publishing a litany of articles about people sidelined into mental hospitals who weren’t truly sick.\r  \r\n\r\r\n\r\n\u0026amp;#x200B;\r\n\r\n\u0026gt;Doctors began to slice and dice their way through “insane” brains. They removed living people’s thyroids, women’s ovaries, and men’s seminal vesicles based on half-baked theories about the genetic origins of madness. An American psychiatrist named Henry Cotton, superintendent of Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey, offered a “focal infection theory” of mental illness, which posited that the toxic by-product of bacterial infections had migrated to the brain, causing insanity. It wasn’t a terrible idea in theory (there are infectious causes of psychosis), but Cotton’s solutions were a nightmare. In an attempt to eliminate the infection, he began by pulling teeth. When that didn’t work, he refused to reconsider and instead removed tonsils, colons, and spleens, which often resulted in permanent disablement or death—and got away with it because his patient population had neither the resources nor the social currency to stop him.\r\n\r\n\u0026amp;#x200B;\r\n\r\n\u0026gt;The Nazis adopted America’s science-approved sadism, sterilizing three hundred thousand or so German psychiatric patients (the most common diagnosis was “feeblemindedness,” followed by schizophrenia and epilepsy) between 1934 and 1939 before they took it one step further and began exterminating “worthless lives”—executing over two hundred thousand mentally ill people in Germany by the end of World War II.\r\n\r\n\u0026amp;#x200B;\r\n\r\n\u0026gt;In fact, psychiatrists expanded the scope of social deviance, pathologizing almost everyone in the process, effectively closing the chasm between sanity and insanity by showing that “true mental health was an illusion,” as anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann wrote in her study of the profession Of Two Minds. According to a now infamous 1962 Midtown Manhattan study based on two-hour interviews with sixteen hundred people in the heart of the city, only 5 percent of the population were deemed mentally “well.” The whole world was suddenly crazy, and psychiatrists were their caped crusaders.\r\n\r\n\u0026amp;#x200B;\r\n\r\nPsychiatry is just a fancy way of saying Professional Narcissism.","subreddit_name":"Antipsychiatry","author":"BreakIll"},{"body":"Here’s an interesting one The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1538715287/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LFIjFbDWSF4ZG","subreddit_name":"booksuggestions","author":"5Monkeysjumpin"}]}