The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

SCIENCE

Sebastian Faulks

Desperate Remedies

Psychiatry and the Mysteries

of Mental Illness

by Andrew Scull

Allen Lane £25 pp494

This is a chilling book. It is the

story of how we have

struggled to deal with the

most human of ailments:

insanity. No one knows why

Homo sapiens is more broken

than other species: why one

in 100 of us hear voices,

hallucinate and are tormented

by delusions; why more than

one in ten will seek help for

less florid but equally

persistent symptoms of

mental disorder.

Andrew Scull begins his

story with the 19th-century

state institutions in the United

States. Though Bedlam

hospital had existed in

London since 1247, the new

asylums in the US and Europe

were the fruit of post-

Enlightenment optimism: the

proper study of mankind is

man. But there was a

problem. Gathering together

the psychotics, the alcoholics,

the depressed, the phobic, the

manic and, in great numbers,

the syphilitic, the epileptic,

the brain-damaged and,

shamefully, the illegitimate,

blind, deaf and troublesome

made it clear by the end of the

19th century that the asylums

could not cure or even help

them; they could only

“warehouse” them.

Psychiatry was from the

start disdained by the medical

mainstream. It had no clear

disease categories, no reliable

medicines and no cures. Cold

baths, hot baths, stupefying

drugs, restraints... Most

“mad doctors” (Britain) or

“alienists” (US) dishing out this

stuff were not even medically

qualified. The German

physician Emil Kraepelin

(1856-1926) tried to dignify

the profession and by

careful study made a

distinction between what

was (catastrophically, but

not by him) christened

“schizophrenia” and “manic

depressive psychosis” (now

known as bipolar disorder).

Kraepelin was the patron of

the biological school, which

believed that mental disorders

were a form of brain disease

with a cause that, once

discovered, would be curable.

Almost 100 years after his

death, we’re still waiting for

any cause or combination of

causes to be found.

Scull’s fascinating and

enraging book is the story of

the quacks and opportunists

who have claimed to offer

cures for mental illness. Here

are the doctors who thought

infection was to blame and

took out teeth, tonsils,

wombs, anything that might

be responsible, especially in

a woman. Here are the men

(always men) who put

patients to sleep in insulin

comas and those who tried to

burn off madness by inducing

malarial fever. Here are the

ones who stuffed a kitchen ice

pick through the eye socket

and cut out anything they

came across inside the brain

(“lobotomy”). Here are the

ones who strapped patients to

a table and passed electric

shocks through their temples

(electroconvulsive therapy, or

ECT) on the grounds that the

quasi-epileptic seizure so

induced would cure them of

unhappiness or delusion.

What all these people had

Fighting the

culture warriors

Douglas Murray on western values

and why they are worth defending

SOCIETY

Robert Colvile

The War on the West
How to Prevail in the Age of
Unreason by Douglas Murray
HarperCollins £20 pp320

One of the central pillars of
Chinese foreign policy is that
no country should interfere in
another’s internal affairs. Yet
there is one glaring exception.
Its foreign ministry’s daily
press conferences are littered
with references to America’s
present and historic sins.
The other day the very first
question helpfully teed up a
long rant about how “ethnic
minorities in the US live under
unease, inequality and fear”.
Douglas Murray’s new
book, The War on the West,
argues that “a cultural war...
is being waged remorselessly
against all the roots of the
western tradition and against
everything good that the
western tradition has
produced”. The warriors
concerned are a home-grown
cadre of activist academics
who are indoctrinating an
entire generation to believe
that every aspect of British
and American history and
society is infected by
prejudice. “Everything in the
past is seen as racist, and so
everything in the past is
tainted.” The flipside of this
is that “if other countries do
have any racism, it must be
because the West exported
the vice to them”. In
obsessing over our own sins,
we allow others — not least
China — to paper over theirs.
This is not a new thesis or
anything like it. The same
depressing case has been
made by others before,
including Murray in his
regular Spectator articles
and previous books on
identity politics and (more
controversially) Islam and
immigration. What is new is
not just the additional focus
on the international context,

but the verve with which he

makes his case.

Murray shows not just

how every aspect of western

society has come under the

iconoclasts’ gaze — from

mathematics to music, Kew

Gardens to Jane Austen — but

how flimsy their case often is.

The poet Ted Hughes was put

on the naughty step by the

British Library for being

descended from Nicholas

Ferrar, who in turn was

“deeply involved” with the

London Virginia Company.

The only problem, apart from

the 338 years between them,

was that none of that colonial

wealth had trickled down by

the time Hughes was born in

rural Yorkshire. And that

Ferrar did not have any

children. And was the author

of a pamphlet attacking

slavery. Written before the

British slave trade even began.

There is, obviously, an

agenda at work here. As

Murray says, Karl Marx was

guilty of horrendous racism

and antisemitism, but his

statues, unlike those of

Washington and even

Lincoln, remain untoppled.

But then, as Murray argues,

such concepts as “evidence”

and “justice” do not seem to

matter much to the new

Savonarolas. They start from

the position that whiteness

is the fundamental problem.

And their logic is, he says,

“the same one favoured by

witch-dunkers in the Middle

Ages”: white people who

object to being called racist

are simply providing further

evidence of their racism.

Wokeness is, in other

words, not an academic

movement but something

closer to a religion — the

complex liturgy, the divide

between the elect and the

damned, the obsession with

the excommunication of

heretics. And of course our

mushy, self-hating churches

have fully surrendered to it.

Murray’s central argument

is that western civilisation,

and the western canon, are

not just worth defending but

must be defended. For

example, as awful as the

slave trade was, the British

government devoted a vast

amount of money, and a sixth

of its naval resources, to

trying to abolish it. Murray

also points out that more

slaves probably went east to

the Arab states than west

across the Atlantic. (One

reason we do not realise

this is that they were

systematically castrated,

leaving very few to make any

modern-day demands for

reparations.) And today it is

estimated that there are more

than 40 million living in

slavery worldwide — whose

plight gets a fraction of the

attention it should.

Yet what I did hope for was

more on how those of us who

also believe in the virtues of

Shakespeare, Austen, Bach

and Bernini can fight back.

Murray makes a convincing

and often terrifying case that

the barbarians are at the

gates. Perhaps his next book

can tell us more about

how to man the walls. c

Protection Protests in

Parliament Square

BOOKS

DOMINIC LIPINSKI/PA

Psychiatry

— a quack

medicine?

There are few heroes in this enraging

study of our attempt to cure mental illness

30 24 April 2022