Episode · Lex Fridman Podcast · 2026-09-17
Books mentioned on #502 – Psychiatry, Insane Asylums, Mental Illness, ECT, Lobotomies, Freud & Jung
Andrew Scull is a historian of psychiatry. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is a powerful post-WWII novel set in a psychiatric ward, exploring institutional oppression, individuality, and conformity through the perspective of Chief Bromden and the rebellious inmate Randle McMurphy.
Discussed“So One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the poverty of the environment, room that the patients were in, I think fairly successfully recreates that way in which staff very often put patients down”
Where to get it
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A Beautiful Mind
Discussed“One of the people who received insulin coma therapy—have you seen the film A Beautiful Mind? Mm-hmm, he did. Receive insulin coma therapy.”
Where to get it
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Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon by David Rogers and Daniel Keyes is a poignant science fiction masterpiece that chronicles a mentally disabled man who undergoes experimental surgery to drastically enhance his intelligence, only to experience a tragic intellectual decline.
Discussed“Now that reminds me of Flowers for Algernon. That doesn't have a happy ending, and it's not about mental health necessarily, but it's about the journey of institution in relation to the health of a patient.”
Where to get it
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Asylum
Discussed“And my friend Patrick McGrath, who's a novelist, wrote a book called Asylum. Patrick grew up in the grounds of Broadmoor. Broadmoor is England's premier hospital for the criminally insane, and he was babysat by some of the patients.”
Where to get it
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Wear and Tear or, Hints for the Overworked
Discussed“Weir Mitchell wrote two popular bestsellers, self-help books, suppose you'd call them in the modern genre. One was called Wear and Tear. The pace of modern life, the telegraph, the railway was all too much.”
Where to get it
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Fat and Blood
Discussed“The solution was Fat and Blood. That was the title of the other book. You got scrawny, nouveau, nervous, twitchy. And what you really needed was to build back up your strength. including your nervous strength.”
Where to get it
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Studies in Hysteria
Discussed“And Breuer collaborate on a book called Studies in Hysteria, and they're a series of case vignettes in there of patients Freud has treated.”
Where to get it
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud is a seminal psychological text published at the dawn of the twentieth century that establishes psychoanalysis and posits dreams as the royal road to the unconscious.
Discussed“He writes The Interpretation of Dreams, for example, because he begins to regard dreams as an arena where these hidden memories, these suppressed- ... things reemerge in disguised form in your dream life.”
Where to get it
