In Search of Madness: A Psychiatrist's Travels Through the History of Mental Illness

By Brendan Kelly

Who is ‘Mad’? Who is Not? And Who Decides?

In this fascinating new exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan Kelly examines ‘madness’ in history and how we have responded to it over the centuries.

We travel from the psychiatric institutions of modern India to scientific studies of the brain in Victorian England. We discover the beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental therapies of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Covering lobotomy and the Nazis’ Aktion T4 campaign, as well as Freud, psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy and neuroscience, In Search of Madness examines the shift in recent times from ‘psychobabble’ to ‘neurobabble’.

This is an all encompassing history of one of the most basic fears to haunt the human psyche – madness – and it concludes with a passionate manifesto for change: four proposals to make mental health services more effective, accessible and just.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Apr 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9780717193790

Brendan Kelly

Professor Brendan Kelly is a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin and a consultant psychiatrist at Tallaght University Hospital in Dublin. In addition to his medical degree, he has master’s degrees in epidemiology, healthcare management, and Buddhist studies, and doctorates in medicine, history, governance, and law. He has published two previous books with Gill, The Doctor Who Sat for a Year and The Science of Happiness.