Welcome to PsychEd, the psychiatry podcast for medical learners, by medical learners.
This is a special episode in a new series — the PsychEd Book Club, a forum where we'll introduce and discuss books of interest to psychiatry learners from a variety of disciplines, moving beyond epidemiology and clinical practice to look at science, history, culture, and more. We'll also invite you to read along and discuss with us as we read!
Our book club episodes will start with a short introductory episode (like this one) sharing the book title and why we picked it. A few months later, we plan to release an episode debriefing our thoughts on the book. If there are specific things you want us to talk about, email us at psychedpodcast@gmail.com or reach out to us on social media and we will try to include them in our debrief!
The first book we'll be covering is Anne Harrington's Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. This is a new history of psychiatry, from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a focus on biological explanations and treatments for mental illness — the way that these approaches have gained and lost ground in the profession over time, clashing and collaborating with other understandings. It offers a wide-ranging overview of many defining figures, discoveries, and shifts within modern mental healthcare, unified by a single narrative which gives the book momentum and makes its portraits memorable, and often stinging. It's a polemical history, which prompts us to reconsider some of the field's most automatic self-conceptions, and to recognize the social, political, and cultural forces that have shaped and reshaped it over time.
Hosts: Drs Kate Braithwaite, Wendy MacMillan-Wang, Alastair Morrison, and Gaurav Sharma
Audio editing by: Dr Angad Singh
For more PsychEd, follow us on Instagram (@psyched.podcast), X (@psychedpodcast), and Facebook (PsychEd Podcast). You can provide feedback by email at psychedpodcast@gmail.com. For more information, visit our website at psychedpodcast.org.