Andrew Scull taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton prior to becoming a professor at UCSD. His articles have appeared in leading journals in a variety of disciplines, including British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, Lancet, European Journal of Sociology, Medical History, Victorian Studies, and Stanford Law Review. He has held fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Davis Center for Historical Studies, and in 1992-1993 was the president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. His most recent books are Madness in Civilization: From the Bible to Freud, and from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, and Psychiatry and Its Discontents. In the spring of 2022, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press will publish his new history of American psychiatry, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
“Scientific Nightmare”: The Backstory of the “DSM”
Andrew Scull gives stellar marks to Allan Horwitz’s history of the DSMs....
De-Nazifying the “DSM”: On “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna”
Edith Sheffer’s book on the history of autism is an impressive piece of historical detective work....
Shooting Magical Bullets at PTSD
A lucky, damaged man lost in a world of magical thinking....
Delusions of Progress: Psychiatry’s Diagnostic Manual
Andrew Scull on "The Book of Woe."...
Psychiatry’s Legitimacy Crisis
ABOUT 40 YEARS AGO, American psychiatry faced an escalating crisis of legitimacy. All sorts of evidence suggested that, when confronted with ...
