A psychiatrist’s travels through the history of mental illness – 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 India to Victorian scientific studies of the brain. Covering institutionalisation, lobotomy and the Nazis’ ‘Aktion T4’, as well as Freud, psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and neuroscience, Professor Kelly examines the shift from ‘psychobabble’ to ‘neurobabble’ in recent times.

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

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.