Mind Fixers

Why, After a Century of Research, We Still Know Very Little About Curing Mental Illness? Guest: Anne Harrington, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, Author of Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness” We talk about outer space as the last frontier. Maybe we have another yet to conquer. Let’s call it inner space. Few of us, today, have not been touched in some way by mental health crisis, and few have not been beset with fears about what we could or should have done differently. Just like the families of those affected, the mental health profession has struggled for over a century to figure out causes and cures for depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, autism, and other brain maladies. The brain has still not yielded its secrets. And we still aren’t even really sure how the mind and brain –and even the soul connect. Even the human genome still mocks our futility on this front. At some level, we know that mental illness has biological roots. But we still don’t know what this means or what to do about it.