Lex Fridman
How psychiatry has tried to treat mental illness, and why it's still so hard
with Andrew Scull, 3 h 37 min
Published
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- Guest
- Andrew Scull
- Published
- Length
- 3 h 37 min
- Views when added
- 1,229,684
- Channel subscribers
- 5,070,000
Chapters from YouTube
- Andrew Scull has spent decades writing the history of psychiatry. Lex Fridman talks with him for over three hours.
- They go through the treatments in order, from asylums to lobotomy, electroshock, talk therapy and drugs.
- Scull keeps finding big cure claims that fell apart, often tried on people who had no say.
- He says today's treatments do help some people, but nobody can tell in advance who.
- Psychosis comes up a lot. It means losing touch with reality, like hearing voices or thinking people are plotting against you.
This is one historian's view of psychiatry, not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before changing any treatment.
What they say
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Psychiatry today eases symptoms but cures nothing, Scull says.
Asylums promised cures, and when they failed, doctors blamed the patients' biology.
Doctors then tried drastic treatments on locked-up patients, before any controlled trials.
Electroshock began brutally, yet Scull accepts it seems to help some severe depression.
War spread Freud's talk therapy, then shorter therapies arrived that could be tested.
Antipsychotic drugs came from a lucky accident, and they help some patients at a cost.
Scull says antidepressants are marginally better than placebo for most patients, while diagnoses keep widening.
Scull wants less hype and more research on how patients actually live.
If you only watch 23 min
Best if you're curious how psychiatry got here and can handle some grim detail.
Books, people and tools they mention
Books
People
Tools and companies
Written by AI from YouTube's captions and checked against them, so mistakes are possible. Captions don't name speakers. Report a mistake
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