Lex Fridman

Here's my conversation with Andrew Scull, all about psychiatry, its long history from Freud/Jung to today, including asylums, icepick lobotomies, electroshock therapy, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some horrific treatments that were considered mainstream where doctors injected patients with malaria, induced insulin comas, and pulled out their teeth, all in the name of curing madness. There are a lot of lessons to learn from history here. One of the most important for me is just how incredibly complex the human mind is, and how hard the task is of understanding & treating the nearly infinite ways it can stumble/faulter. Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 1:20 - Crisis in Psychiatry 30:58 - Categories of Mental Illness 38:17 - Asylums, Eugenics, and the Nazis 50:23 - The Ice Pick Lobotomy 56:36 - Malaria "Cure" for Syphilis 1:14:52 - Insulin Coma Therapy 1:22:44 - Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) 1:42:13 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 1:59:45 - Freud and Psychoanalysis 2:29:40 - WWII and Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) 2:50:14 - Antipsychotics 3:13:35 - Antidepressants 3:26:29 - Future of Psychiatry