The Madness Pill by Justin Garson

About the Book:

A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia.

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.

Centered around Solomon Snyder, the psychiatrist who ultimately did identify the madness pill, and the community of doctors and researchers he worked with, THE MADNESS PILL recounts the drug-fueled quest to cure schizophrenia. A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, Snyder worked steadily for decades to replicate the illness, ultimately finding in 1970 that amphetamines could trigger a schizophrenia-like state by flooding the brain with dopamine. Five years later, he went on to discover the dopamine receptor and proved that antipsychotic drugs work by disabling dopamine neurons. Snyder’s dopamine hypothesis inspired a generation of researchers to part ways with psychoanalysis and look for the biological basis of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Using first-hand research and interviews, THE MADNESS PILL is at once a raucous history and insightful portrait of a remarkable scientist who turned psychiatry into a respected science by transforming how mental illness is treated.

You can read an excerpt here.

My Review:

Garson has a personal interest in this topic as his own father was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after Garson's birth. The father did not want drugs and was restored to sanity through psychiatry sessions. He was able to continue work until symptoms returned a little over a decade later. Understanding of the disease had advanced and hospitalization with medication was frequent. The results were not good, however.

Garson explores the change in the medical world's understanding and treatment of the disease over the last decades. He writes of the research, the theories, the attempts to treat the condition. He concentrates on Dr. Snyder and his fellow researchers as they ultimately discovered a biological cause to the disease.

I appreciate this book. Garson has taken a difficult subject and helped me see the personal nature of it. This is a very readable book for those interested in science in general and mental disease in particular.

My rating: 4/5 stars.

About the Author:

Justin Garson, Ph.D., is a philosopher and historian of science at the City University of New York. He’s written numerous scholarly books and articles on biology, mind, and madness, including Madness: A Philosophical Exploration. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and children.

St Martin's Press, 240 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent review.

(My star ratings: 5-An exceptional book, 4-Better than average, relevant and liked by me, 3-It is average, 2-It is below average and not liked by me, 1-It is practically unreadable.)