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
Sep 17, 2026 · 12:55 AM UTC
Here's the links for my conversation with Andrew Scull:
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=s7d2d8Fh…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0B…
Podcast: lexfridman.com/podcast
It’s frightening how human naïveté, excessive confidence, and desperation to find a cure can lead to such cruelty — injuring and killing so many people in the search for a solution.
A brutal lesson in via negativa: some errors only became obvious after they harmed people, leaving behind hard-won knowledge for future generations.
I will check this out. My dad had a history of paranoia - it seems to have been more nurture than nature but he was a great man who provided for his family until his illness got hold of him. We all love him dearly. He never hurt anyone. He did find some peace in his last years once he decided to “do what they want” and go back to his psychiatrist where, once he got back on his meds, he understood that he needed them. Unfortunately, the meds need to be constantly adjusted or changed outright b/c, when they work, the same dose or even med, does not always work as effectively over time. One thing I can say is that antipsychotics should not be administered through Telehealth. That said, what about people that cannot afford the many sessions of a psychiatrist? I have no easy answer, as all solutions seem to get gamed and abused. But I will say definitively from personal experience that they can work when carefully and appropriately administered, but need to be constantly monitored and adjusted. I thank psychiatry for the ten years of relative peace it gave my father (and our family), before he passed away.
Hi Lex, for completeness:
anti psychotics are LD-50 test proven toxic substances
e.g Zyprexa is a poison, see PUBCHEM
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/com…
Combine this with *forced* treatment laws governments are mass killing patients.
otpcr.rtfd.io
#ggz
!!
Some things to look up:
The Icarus Project, Mind Freedom International, Diabasis and John Weir Perry, Soteria House, a book called “The Spiritual Gift of Madness”….
Psychiatry has been a huge mess for years and years
By rights it should be outlawed and all its social and cultural functions radically reexamined
(Diabasis was an experimental facility where they took people who had their first psychosis and cured them without drugs. It worked. Obviously it had to be destroyed)
Another relevant book, to understand institutional dynamics and what gives rise to them: “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease”
Interesting so far. The only thing is that he made it seem like NIMH under Insel did extensive research into biological origins. They did not. They exclusively focused on genetics. According to Dr. Fuller Torrey: “All they have found so far are risk genes which don’t cause disease but may make it worse once you get it. All diseases have dozens or even hundreds of risk genes but very few diseases such as Huntington’s disease have causal genes. My paper argues that 25 years of research by NIMH has found no causal genes and therefore NIMH should spend more of their resources looking for non-genetics causes, such as infectious agents and immune disorders.”
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
This evil definitely exists today and is in full swing.
This is one of the causes of mass insanity in the streets of America.
If you, as an "untrained" person were to periodically interview (simply talk and take notes) one of these unfortunate street people as their "help" progressed, you would plainly see them getting much worse.
The "professionals" imagine this same person as getting "better" or "improving" as they descend into a state where they can no longer hold a conversation, let alone hold a job.
This "product" (which is VERY expensive to the taxpayers) is plainly visible to all America, at this point.
So it is NOT different than 50 or 100 years ago. The evidence is ALL AROUND US.
These people who cannot hold a conversation have been BRUTALIZED. Not helped.
By the way, not everyone's mind is a complex mess. They just say that to explain away the fact that they are unable to bring about improvement. (Ask Elon Musk about an "expert" bridge builder who can't build a bridge that doesn't collapse.)
@elonmusk
Of course you don’t want to do anything illegal, rebellious, unsafe, that you’re not supposed to do but if you have PTSD flash backs, triggers, ever did have them, these things just so happen to be around, you just so happen to be in a situation where it’s possible…
@elonmusk
The so called cure for depression/PTSD rhetoric related to ketamine, psychedelics, psilocybin, is overblown; that doesn’t keep curious, open minded confused or badly influenced children and young adults from experimenting, finding out the results without documentation
Fantastic episode about psychiatry and its Hx, @lexfridman ... there is a documentary on the era of closure of institutions in US, it called something like From Back Wards to Back Streets a really fascinating acount of the events shot in (?)80s
they don’t have to see/hear anything not there, believe in anything not true, have delusions, hallucinations, false beliefs, mood or perception disorder issues, interpersonal victim perception or false victimization, nor think the world is out to get them in any way, shape, form
Imagine having been very deeply “in love with” someone who treated you like this, needing them to be daddy or mommy. Imagine having boyfriends who only want to be your handler, get paid money for taking care of you in fraud or abuse over if you were a feminist or might be
It can actually be abused as a form of torture on purpose (not accidental or unintentional) inflicted harm or misunderstanding at all, (though some might claim that for a lack of plausible liability or non disclosures,) in practice to criminalize or make crazy political dissent
on a side note this is sometimes done to people in malicious, malevolent, spiteful, vindictive, Machiavellian ways when it’s weaponized, political, punitive abuse of psychiatry, psychology, social sciences, behavioural engineering, information warfare in punishment or repression