The Madness Pill

""... echoing Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks... Thoroughly readable science that rests on solid archival discoveries."" --Library Journal, starred review ""An enlightening biography of a titan of neuroscience and a fascinating guide to how mental illness takes shape in the brain."" --Robert Kolker, author of the #1 NYT bestseller Hidden Valley Road ""With style and insight, Justin Garson has spun a riveting tale of the man whose unruly experiments revolutionized psychiatry. This was a thrilling read from the first to the last word."" --Audrey Farley, author of Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America ""A fun, fast-paced, fascinating account of one of the most influential figures in the rise of biological psychiatry. Garson's book will leave readers reflecting on what it means to suffer, go mad, and be human."" --Laura Delano, author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance ""A timely, gripping, and deeply informed narrative about the search to understand and treat psychosis, the most unsettling of psychiatric conditions. It's a problem on many minds, as mayors and governors across the country struggle to shape meaningful mental health policies. Driven by his own father's battle with paranoid schizophrenia, Garson offers us invaluable illumination."" --Daniel Bergner, author of The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search For Our Psyches ""A page-turning biography of a complex giant in the field of biological psychiatry but it is also so much more. The legacies of the fascinating and fateful experiments told in this book still shape psychiatry today."" --Anne Harrington, author of Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness