Desperate Remedies

#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung

Lex Fridman Podcast, 17 September 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at the start.

Lex Fridman names Desperate Remedies in his opening as one of Scull's highly recommended books. Scull describes conceiving it in 1981 while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in London, working on it piecemeal over forty years alongside other projects, and ultimately writing a comprehensive history of psychiatry from its origins to the present. He notes he could not have written it earlier and would have missed all developments from 1980 onward.

Listen to this episode ↗︎