EP5: Harvard Professor Anne Harrington Confronts Psychiatry’s Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

Dr. Harrington received her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Oxford University, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. For six years, she co-directed Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. She also was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interaction.

 

We spent the duration of the episode discussing themes outlined in her book 'Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental illness', a book that highlights psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.