Book description
In the years between 1900 and 1930, American psychiatrists transformed their profession from a marginal science focused primarily on the care of the mentally ill into a powerful discipline concerned with analyzing the common difficulties of everyday life. How did psychiatrists effect such a dramatic change in their profession's fortunes…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Psychiatric Persuasion as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
No list on the dubious history of psychiatry would be complete without a book about psychiatry’s efforts to control women. This is a classic in this regard. Focusing on the first quarter of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Lunbeck shows how psychiatrists, in an effort to assert their relevance and professional authority, brought issues related to marriage, sexuality, and gender into their ambit.
This book is deft in revealing how psychiatrists wielded the power to define normality to pathologize nonconforming women and insinuate themselves into our most intimate spheres. Although the history that Lunbeck recounts is now a century in the…
From Owen's list on psychiatry’s troubled past.
If you love The Psychiatric Persuasion...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Want books like The Psychiatric Persuasion?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 79 books like The Psychiatric Persuasion.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,277
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like The Psychiatric Persuasion, you might also like...
The Bridge
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
And Then They Were Gone
Of the 918 Americans who died in the shocking murder-suicides of November 18, 1978, in the tiny South American country of Guyana, a third were under eighteen. More than half were in their twenties or younger.
The authors taught in a small high school in San Francisco where Reverend Jim…
