I got hooked learning about the development of modern psychiatry. I saw for the first time the famous painting of French physician Philippe Pinel casting chains off of “lunatics” at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, ushering in a new era of supposedly humane treatment for the afflicted and a modern, moral psychiatric movement. I read books like Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic, and studied signs of “shell shock” (now known as post-traumatic stress disorder) in soldiers returning home from World War I. I read every version of the Diagnostic and Statistical
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