Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry

**The inspiration for the PBS series *Mysterious of Mental Illness*, *Shrinks* brilliantly tells the groundbreaking story of psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption.** 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***