On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing by Owen Whooley

Abstract

The history of American psychiatry is a history of ignorance. Underlying psychiatry's repeated crises and its regular reincarnations, its faddish theories and epistemic somersaults, its egregious abuses and occasional achievements, is a stubborn inconvenient fact: the knowledge regarding the nature of mental distress remains elusive. Charged with imposing reason on madness, psychiatrists have conducted fruitless attempts to comprehend the essential character and mechanisms of mental illness. Madness evades understanding. Nevertheless, psychiatry endures. On the 'Heels of Ignorance' tells the story of psychiatry's unlikely resilience. The general superintendence of all their departments -- Unruly ignorance and pragmatic eclecticism -- Ignorance repressed -- It takes a community to raise a profession -- Profession of the book.