Gee’s Reviews > In Praise of Folly: The Blind-spots of Our Mind > Status Update

‘Psychiatry is thus the XXth cent. witchcraft, & its unmitigated practice the employment of demons.’ This was written in 1936, and prescient. Psychiatry has moved away from the treatment of the obviously mad to claim sovereignty over all forms of human distress and misconduct. In the twenty-first century it does resemble witchcraft, with its medications often (though not always) serving as eye of newt and wool of bat

under the pressure of modernisation, the universities were expanded, a university education retained the connotation of belonging to an elite but not its denotation, for now there were simply too many graduates for the society to accord elite positions. Bitterly disappointed and disillusioned, the students and alumni, or some of them, turned to revolution as the means of obtain the prominence in society