Shrinks, Jeffrey A. Lieberman
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Shrinks
The Untold Story of Psychiatry

Author: Jeffrey A. Lieberman, Ogi Ogas

Narrator: Graham Corrigan

Unabridged: 9 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/10/2015


Synopsis

The inspiration for the PBS series Mysterious of Mental Illness, Shrinks brilliantly tells the "astonishing" story of psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption (Siddhartha Mukherjee). 

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public.

But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.

In Shrinks, Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity — beginning after World War II — as a science-driven profession that saves lives. With fascinating case studies and portraits of the luminaries of the field — from Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel — Shrinks is a gripping and illuminating read, and an urgent call-to-arms to dispel the stigma of mental illnesses by treating them as diseases rather than unfortunate states of mind.

“A lucid popular history...At once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come.” —Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe

Author Bio

Over his forty-year career, world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman’s groundbreaking research has pioneered a transformative strategy for the early detection and prevention of schizophrenia. A member of the National Academy of Medicine and recipient of the Lieber Prize for Schizophrenia Research, the APA’s Adolf Meyer Award, and NAMI Scientific Research Award, Dr. Lieberman served as American Psychiatric Association (APA) president in 2013 and 2014). He has contributed to federal legislation to improve mental health care access and quality while reducing stigma associated with mental illness, and is also the author of Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, which became the basis for the four-part PBS series, Mysteries of Mental Illness.

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