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Shock therapy is making a comeback today in the treatment of serious mental illness. Despite its reemergence as a safe and effective psychiatric tool, however, it continues to be shrouded by a longstanding negative public image, not least due to films such as the classic One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, where the inmate of a psychiatric clinic (played by Jack Nicholson) is subjected to electro-shock to curb his rebellious behavior. Beyond its vilification in popular culture, the stereotype of convulsive therapy as a dangerous and inhumane practice is fuelled by professional posturing and public misinformation. Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, has in the last thirty years been considered a method of last resort in the treatment of debilitating depression, suicidal ideation, and other forms of mental illness. Yet, ironically, its effectiveness in treating these patients would suggest it as a frontline therapy, bringing relief from acute symptoms and saving lives.

In this book, Edward Shorter and David Healy trace the controversial history of ECT and other "shock" therapies. Drawing on case studies, public debates, extensive interviews, and archival research, the authors expose the myths about ECT that have proliferated over the years. By showing ECT's often life-saving results, Shorter and Healy endorse a point of view that is hotly contested in professional circles and in public debates, but for the nearly half of all clinically depressed patients who do not respond to drugs, this book brings much needed hope.

Hirshbein, a medical historian and clinical psychiatrist, first shows how cigarettes functioned in the old system of psychiatric care, revealing that mental health providers long ago noted the important role of cigarettes within treatment settings and the strong attachment of many mentally ill individuals to their cigarettes. Hirshbein also relates how, as the sale of cigarettes dwindled, the tobacco industry quietly researched alternative markets, including those who smoked for psychological reasons, ultimately discovering connections between mental states and smoking, and the addictive properties of nicotine. However, Smoking Privileges warns that to see smoking among the mentally ill only in terms of addiction misses how this behavior fits into the broader context of their lives. Cigarettes not only helped structure their relationships with other people, but also have been important objects of attachment. Indeed, even after psychiatric hospitals belatedly instituted smoking bans in the late twentieth century, smoking remained an integral part of life for many seriously ill patients, with implications not only for public health but for the ongoing treatment of psychiatric disorders. Making matters worse, well-meaning tobacco-control policies have had the unintended consequence of further stigmatizing the mentally ill.

A groundbreaking look at a little-known public health problem, Smoking Privileges illuminates the intersection of smoking and mental illness, and offers a new perspective on public policy regarding cigarettes.

Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) played a key role in the construction of the modern concept of sexuality. As the author of the famous Psychopathia sexualis, he named and classified virtually all nonprocreative sexualities, synthesizing knowledge on sadism, masochism, fetishism, homosexuality, and exhibitionism. His influence on the study of sexuality cannot be overstated, but it is often misunderstood. In the wake of Michel Foucault's influential sexual histories, Krafft-Ebing is often maligned as a contributor to the repressed Victorian construction of sexual deviancy.

But in this powerful new cultural history Harry Oosterhuis invites us to reconsider the quality and extent of Krafft-Ebing's influence. Revisiting the case studies on which Krafft-Ebing based his findings, and thus drawing on the voices of his patients and informants, Oosterhuis finds that Krafft-Ebing was not the harsh judge of perversions that we think he was. He argues that Krafft-Ebing had a deep appreciation of the psyche, and that his work reveals an attempt to separate sexual deviancies from ideas of immorality. In the tradition of Freud, then, Krafft-Ebing should stand not as a villain, but as a contributor to more modern notions of sexual identity.

 

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. In 1972, he published this career-spanning collection, and it has remained highly influential in multiple fields ever since. Ranging across anthropology, psychology and psychiatry, cybernetics, and much more, Bateson addresses culture, the self and the mind, addiction, the then-nascent field of computer science, and the very components of thought itself. This edition offers a new foreword by his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson reflecting on his career and thought, showing why this astonishing book continues to delight and inform readers, decades after its original publication.