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  • The American Scholar

    Shrinking Success

    Mar 04, 2019 4 minutes
    Review by Scott Stossel

    MIND FIXERS: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

    BY ANNE HARRINGTON

    Norton, 384 pp., $27.95

    PSYCHIATRY TODAY IS IN CRISIS. By some reckonings, mental illness is more prevalent than ever—yet the effectiveness rates of most treatments are no higher than they were 40 years ago. The profession is riven, as ever, by internecine clashes. The field’s guiding text, the its bible since 1952, has been officially abandoned by the National Institute of Mental Health; the DSM’s most recent edition, the fifth, was bitterly denounced by the editor of the fourth. Most of psychiatry’s “cutting-edge” treatments date to the 1950s—and in some cases the 1930s. Even its basic terminology seems to be unraveling:

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