#502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung

Lex Fridman (0:00)

The following is a conversation with Andrew Scull, a historian of psychiatry and mental health. He has authored many books that I highly recommend, including Madness in Civilization, A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, From the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, and Desperate Remedies, Psychiatry's Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness. Andrew Scull has spent decades studying how societies have understood madness, how psychiatry rose to authority, and how often that authority was used with confidence and catastrophic consequences. In this conversation, we will trace the long arc from the asylum era to eugenics, from lobotomy and insulin comotherapy to electroconvulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and the modern crisis of mental health. It is, in part, a story about the terrifying history of bad ideas in medicine, but it is also about the fascinating mystery of the human mind, and about the difficult journey to understand it.

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All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Wispr Flow, the AI voice dictation app I use that lets me and lets you write prompts to AI by speaking. Well, you can write anything, really. You can add a custom dictionary of words that you want to make sure it gets right. All of that is available, a ton of different features. It's kind of miraculous that speech to text took so long to get right. This is an obvious thing for many years. It works really well across operating systems. I in particular like to use it on Android, just flawlessly integrated into the computing experience. I think I always wish to exist it and now it does, so you too can try it out at whisperflow.ai/lex to get one month of Whisper Flow Pro Free. That's W-I-S-P-R Flow dot A-I slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by FIN, the number one agent for customer service. There are very few things as important to the success of a company as an obsessive care for the happiness of its customers. So you gotta use the best tools available to you if you're a company, small, medium, large, to address the needs, the concerns, the issues that come up with the customers. FIN is just a really powerful, respected, highly lauded tool for helping you with that. 65% average resolution rate, trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders and top companies, including AI companies, many of which you know. When an AI company trusts another AI company to do a specific niche thing like customer service, you know they're legit. Go to fin.ai-lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai-lex.

This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I'm sipping on right now as I'm mentally preparing to go out once more into the breach, dear friends, the breach of the insane Texas heat as I run who knows how many miles. But I'll be rough and it'll be beautiful. I have a love-hate relationship with running, mostly on the hate side. The love comes with ignoring the voice that wants to be lazy, wants to avoid the thing you don't want to do, and overcoming it and getting out there, getting a good run in. That feeling when you've accomplished that little bit of a hard thing, especially when it's done on a daily basis, is a beautiful feeling. Anyway, the electrolytes help before and after, and element is the best and the most delicious way I found to get electrolytes into my system. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, watermelon salt is the flavor. Get a free Acom sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex.

This episode is also brought to you by Shopify.

A company, the CEO of which, Toby is somebody who comes up very often, especially when I'm talking to DHH and we just did a podcast with DHH. Previously, celebrator of beautiful Ruby code. Currently, celebrator of agentic engineering in the context especially of Linux and his new Omachi Linux distribution system. It's always a joy to talk to him. I love people who love building and he's that. And Toby is also that. Great engineer, great leader of engineers. So whenever a company is led by a great engineer like that, and also somebody who is very interesting, not just on the technical side but on the philosophical side, it's always exciting when a company like that becomes successful. And so I will forever celebrate Shopify because of Toby and because of the great team of engineers that they have. But on the service side, you know, what Shopify is allows you to sell stuff. Sellers to find buyers and you too can find the buyers by signing up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com To take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P help.