TBR Pile Review: Madness in Civilization, by Andrew Scull

Blurb

This ambitious volume, worldwide in scope and ranging from antiquity to the present, examines the human encounter with Unreason in all its manifestations, the challenges it poses to society and our responses to it. In twelve chapters organized chronologically from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Andrew Scull writes compellingly about madness, its meanings, its consequences and our attempts to understand and treat it. 

My Review

I was recommended this book for some reason and I’ve been reading it for months as part of my research for the neurodivergent history project for work. I finished it the other day and I’m just getting around to reviewing it.

This book is very densely written covering several thousand years. I wouldn’t agree with the blurb that it is global in scope, it is much more focused on Europe and North America, with occasional excursions to other places colonised by European countries and even fewer discussions of places outside of those areas. Africa, most of Asia and all of South America are ignored. It’s very Anglo-centric. Most of the book really only covers the history of psychiatry in England, France and Germany, with some reference to the U.S. later in the book. It’s going to be helpful for my heritage project, but I would have liked to read more about the rest of the world.

I found the sections on madness in the arts fascinating. I had read something about it in Those They Called Idiots, by Simon Jarrett. This book doesn’t cover learning disability, but madness was often conflated with idiocy in the past. If you were too much hard work for your family to care for, you could quite possibly end up in an asylum or workhouse. The presentation of madness in art and literature, as with disability, changed and influenced how people saw madness and disability.

Problems with the book: Scull clearly knows nothing about Autism or being Autistic, and repeats the lie that there’s an epidemic of Autism. He treats other highly heritable neurodivergencies, such as schizophrenia, equally badly and with limited understanding.

Scull clearly doesn’t like psychiatry as a profession, which is fair enough. A lot of people have been harmed by psychiatry and the narrow ideas of psychiatrists using diagnostic manuals as check lists rather than understanding individual patients. His cynicism gets a bit much at times though.

Generally, not a bad book but approach with caution.