New book "Mind Fixers" trashes psychiatry

it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster....

The pathological basis of almost all mental disorders remains as unknown today as it was in 1886—unsurprising, given that the brain turns out to be one of the most complex objects in the universe....

It follows that psychiatrists also cannot precisely predict for whom and under what conditions their treatments will work. That is why antipsychotic drugs are routinely prescribed to depressed people, for example, and antidepressants to people with anxiety disorders. Psychiatry remains an empirical discipline, its practitioners as dependent on their (and their colleagues’) experience to figure out what will be effective as Pliny Earle and his colleagues were. Little wonder that the history of such a field—reliant on the authority of scientific medicine even in the absence of scientific findings—is a record not only of promise and setback, but of hubris.