Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry

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.

"Astonishing." --Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies

"A lucid popular history ... At once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come." --Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe