If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Did you know that some of psychiatry’s earliest "cures" included brain-piercing tools, induced comas, and even intentional malaria infections?
- Have you ever wondered why psychiatry spent decades fighting for legitimacy as a real science, and what finally changed its reputation?
- Are you curious about the shocking breakthroughs and dark secrets that transformed mental asylums into the modern therapeutic practices we use today?
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Key Takeaways from Shrinks
- Discover how early psychiatric pioneers like Philippe Pinel and Benjamin Rush transformed horrifying, abusive asylums into centers for humane treatment.
- Explore why early physicians attributed mental illnesses to physical and energetic blockages, leading to bizarre historical therapies like rotational chairs and animal magnetism.
- Understand Sigmund Freud's revolutionary model of the subconscious, which divides the human mind into the primal id, the mediating ego, and the moral superego.
- Find out how the intense internal conflict between our selfish desires and ingrained moral standards forms the root of psychiatric illness according to Freudian theory.
- Trace the dramatic 300-year evolution of psychiatric care, from primitive practices like bloodletting and public displays to the groundbreaking development of the modern talking cure.
Shrinks — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: In the eighteenth century, reformers sought to reform the dreadful, barren asylums confining people with mental illnesses.
Chapter 3: Famed doctors tried treating mental illness as if it stemmed from some sort of blockage in bodily flows.
Chapter 4: Sigmund Freud transformed our grasp of the human mind.
Chapter 5: Freud’s talking cure aimed to heal mentally ill patients by resolving their inner conflicts.
Chapter 6: Thanks to Freud, psychoanalysis gathered momentum in Europe and the United States.
Chapter 7: Psychiatry grew popular, yet far-fetched approaches proliferated quickly.
Chapter 8: In the early 1900s, crude new therapies targeted the brains of psychiatric patients directly.
Chapter 9: Shock therapy emerged in the 1930s and remains widely in use today.
Chapter 10: New medications began to treat major psychiatric disorders during the 1950s successfully.
Chapter 11: Psychiatry faced fierce criticism amid a wave of skepticism in the ’60s and ’70s.
Chapter 12: By the 1980s, diagnoses became more objective and far less speculative.
Chapter 13: New scientific discoveries have given psychiatry an optimistic future.
Shrinks Summary & Overview
Shrinks (2015) tells the story of psychiatry’s astonishing development throughout the centuries. These blinks take us on a tour of the discipline’s crude past, its strange and shocking therapies and its great improvements.
Who Should Listen to Shrinks?
- History buffs interested in the nature of early psychiatry
- Individuals wanting to learning more about the methods of psychiatry today
- Those wondering why psychology sometimes gets a bad rap
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