Anne Harrington

At Harvard, Harrington has taught courses on "Madness and Medicine", "Evolution and Human Nature", "Broken Brains", “Stories under the Skin”, "Freud and the American Academy", "The Minded Body" and "In Search of Mind".

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

In this book Harrington shows that the pathological basis of almost all mental disorders remains as unknown today as it was in 1886. Even as psychiatrists prescribe a widening variety of treatments, none of them can say exactly why any of these biological therapies work. Regarding the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness, she writes “Ironically, just as the public was embracing the ‘serotonin imbalance’ theory of depression, researchers were forming a new consensus” about the idea behind that theory: It was “deeply flawed and probably outright wrong.”

A reviewer in The Atlantic wrote: "t’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster."