Mind Fixers Quotes

“Heroic origin stories and polemical counterstories may give us momentary emotional satisfaction by inviting us to despise cartoonish renderings of our perceived rivals and enemies. The price we all pay, though, is tunnel vision, mutual recrimination, and stalemate. For the sake not just of the science but of all the suffering people whom the science should be serving, it is time for us all to learn and to tell better, more honest stories.”
― Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

“but were actually heroes: people who, having lost their moorings in the inauthentic world we call normal life, were now on a perilous journey to discover what the world might be like without the masks of false consciousness that the rest of us habitually wear.”
― Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

“Thus in his 2009 Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia, the historian and clinical psychologist Richard Noll lamented “the tragic years of psychoanalysis” before declaring that “it took major advances in medical technology, specifically the computer revolution and the rise of new techniques in neuroimaging, genetics research, and psychopharmacology to swing the pendulum back to Kraepelin’s search for the biological causes of the psychotic disorders.”
― Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

“The future of psychiatry, he said, lay not with the old talk therapists and analysts but with a new generation of clinician-scientists he called “the mind-fixers”: “research psychiatrists . . . working quietly in laboratories, dissecting the brains of mice and men and teasing out the chemical formulas that unlock the secrets of the mind.”5”
― Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

“And in fact, Flechsig had repeatedly insisted that modern brain science had shown that the 'soul' was nothing more than a system of 'nerves.”
― Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness