#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung

Sep 17, 2026 · · YouTube

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Transcript

asr · 29,974 words · docs

0:00The following is a conversation with Andrew Skull, a historian of psychiatry and mental health.

0:05He has authored many books that I highly recommend, including Madness in Civilization, A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, and Desperate Remedies, Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness.

0:24Andrew Skull has spent decades studying how societies have understood madness, how psychiatry rose to authority, and how often that authority was used with false confidence and catastrophic consequences.

0:37In this conversation, we trace the long arc from the asylum era to eugenics, from lobotomy and insulin comatherapy to electroconvulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and the modern crisis of mental health.

0:52It is, in part, a story about the terrifying history of bad ideas in medicine, but it is also about the fascinating mystery of the human mind and about the difficult journey to understand it.

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