I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

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

Lex Fridman Podcast, 17 September 2026. The book comes up at 1 hr 52 min in.

Andrew Scull contrasts I Never Promised You a Rose Garden with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, describing it as a much more sympathetic portrait of psychiatry. He explains it centres on Frieda Fromm Reichman, who treated schizophrenia with psychotherapy at Chestnut Lodge in Maryland, and notes the novel was a bestseller written by a young patient of Reichman's. The film changes various things from the novel.

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