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9781451636338

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An admirably comprehensive account of the history of the care of the mentally ill in the United States. Gerald Grob has spent most of his very distinguished career probing social responses to madness and trying to fit them into a larger pattern of historical meaning. The Mad Among Us is a popular condensation of Grob's four earlier books...Readers both fascinated with Grob's work and new to it will find The Mad Among Us accessible and fascinating. It covers historical terrain that is vast, compelling, and even more controversial than it was when Grob began his work on mental illness over 30 years ago. -- Ellen Herman Contemporary Psychology Gerald Grob...has devoted over thirty years to the study of psychiatry's odyssey in the United States. This single volume is a summation of his work. Careful not to adhere to any one of psychiatry's schools, Professor Grob is as skeptical about the claims for today's 'community psychiatry' as for last century's 'moral treatment'. His examination makes available to psychiatrists an extraordinarily helpful account of their vicissitudes over the past two centuries--helpful in that historical perspective is a remedy for a cyclical pattern of excessive optimism and bitter despair over the treatment of the severely mentally ill...Grob's study--balanced, thoughtful, and objective--is a remarkable account of an elusive subject. -- David F. Musto Times Literary Supplement The public attitude toward the insane, Mr. Grob notes, keeps shifting from 'compassion [and] sympathy' to 'rejection and stigmatization.' In his history of mental health care in America, Mr. Grob traces those attitudes from Colonial times to the present and concludes that the policy of deinstitutionalization is where our present troubles treating the mentally ill began.

The public attitude toward the insane, Mr. Grob notes, keeps shifting from 'compassion [and] sympathy' to 'rejection and stigmatization.' In his history of mental health care in America, Mr. Grob traces those attitudes from Colonial times to the present and concludes that the policy of deinstitutionalization is where our present troubles treating the mentally ill began.

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Geral N. Grob is Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine at Rutgers University.

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