Mad Among Us - by Gerald N Grob (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, the foremost historian in the field compellingly recounts our various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma from colonial times to the present.Gerald Grob charts the growth of mental hospitals in response to the escalating numbers of the severely and persistently mentally ill and the deterioration of these hospitals under the pressure of too many patients and too few resources. Mounting criticism of psychiatric techniques such as shock therapies, drugs, and lobotomies and of mental institutions as inhumane places led to a new emphasis on community care and treatment. While some patients benefited from the new community policies, they were ineffective for many mentally ill substance abusers. Grob's definitive history points the way to new solutions. It is at once an indispensable reference and a call for a humane and balanced policy in the future.

From the Back Cover

In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, the foremost historian in the field compellingly recounts out various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma from colonial times to the present.

Review Quotes

The public attitude toward the insane, Mr. Grob notes, keeps shifting from 'compassion [and] sympathy' to 'rejection and stigmatization.' In his history of mental health care in America, Mr. Grob traces those attitudes from Colonial times to the present and concludes that the policy of deinstitutionalization is where our present troubles treating the mentally ill began.

An admirably comprehensive account of the history of the care of the mentally ill in the United States.

Gerald Grob has spent most of his very distinguished career probing social responses to madness and trying to fit them into a larger pattern of historical meaning. "The Mad Among Us" is a popular condensation of Grob's four earlier books...Readers both fascinated with Grob's work and new to it will find "The Mad Among Us" accessible and fascinating. It covers historical terrain that is vast, compelling, and even more controversial than it was when Grob began his work on mental illness over 30 years ago. -- Ellen Herman "Contemporary Psychology"

Gerald Grob...has devoted over thirty years to the study of psychiatry's odyssey in the United States. This single volume is a summation of his work. Careful not to adhere to any one of psychiatry's schools, Professor Grob is as skeptical about the claims for today's 'community psychiatry' as for last century's 'moral treatment'. His examination makes available to psychiatrists an extraordinarily helpful account of their vicissitudes over the past two centuries--helpful in that historical perspective is a remedy for a cyclical pattern of excessive optimism and bitter despair over the treatment of the severely mentally ill...Grob's study--balanced, thoughtful, and objective--is a remarkable account of an elusive subject. -- David F. Musto "Times Literary Supplement"

About the Author

Geral N. Grob is Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine at Rutgers University.