Wear and Tear

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

Lex Fridman Podcast, 17 September 2026. The book comes up at 2 hr 13 min in.

Andrew Scull describes Silas Weir Mitchell's Wear and Tear as one of two popular bestseller self-help books arguing that the pace of modern life—the telegraph, the railway—was overstressing the nervous system, depleting it like a battery running down or a business going bankrupt.

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