Here's my conversation with Andrew Scull, all about psychiatry, its long history from Freud/Jung to today, including asylums, icepick lobotomies, electroshock therapy, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some horrific treatments that were considered mainstream where doctors injected patients with malaria, induced insulin comas, and pulled out their teeth, all in the name of curing madness.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from history here. One of the most important for me is just how incredibly complex the human mind is, and how hard the task is of understanding & treating the nearly infinite ways it can stumble/faulter.
Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess.
It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment).
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
1:20 - Crisis in Psychiatry
30:58 - Categories of Mental Illness
38:17 - Asylums, Eugenics, and the Nazis
50:23 - The Ice Pick Lobotomy
56:36 - Malaria "Cure" for Syphilis
1:14:52 - Insulin Coma Therapy
1:22:44 - Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)
1:42:13 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1:59:45 - Freud and Psychoanalysis
2:29:40 - WWII and Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
2:50:14 - Antipsychotics
3:13:35 - Antidepressants
3:26:29 - Future of Psychiatry
Here's the links for my conversation with Andrew Scull:
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=s7d2d8Fh…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0B…
Podcast: lexfridman.com/podcast
Sep 17, 2026 · 12:55 AM UTC
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a must-watch episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast. 🧠
This conversation with historian Andrew Scull is, I’m sure, a fascinating and perhaps even deeply unsettling journey through the history of psychiatry, as well as some of the realities surrounding psychiatric care that continue to affect people to this day.
They discuss everything from Freud and Jung to asylums, eugenics, lobotomies, insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and some of the truly horrific treatments that were once considered legitimate approaches to treating human beings with mental health issues.
There are so many reasons to listen to this conversation...
For anyone interested in psychiatry, psychology, history, medicine, or simply the incredible complexity of being human, I highly recommend giving this episode a listen.
As someone who spent almost two months in a psychiatric ward after being admitted to a high-security psychiatric ward on August 22, 2005, when I was just an innocent young woman of 24 years old studying at the University of Windsor, I can speak from personal experience when I say that people in psychiatric wards, even today, are not always treated with the respect, compassion, dignity, or humanity that every human being deserves.
This is a subject that is deeply personal to me, and one that I believe deserves honest discussion.
I’m going to listen to this podcast right now, and then return and share my thoughts on the discussion.
Let’s listen all together. Let’s all learn together. And let’s all have the courage to speak honestly about what is happening in our world. 🤍
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