Danielle Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. She is working on a series of projects examining the politics of neurophysiology.
Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering.
The rise of psychiatry was funded by America’s Gilded Age industrialists. Their aim: to cast society’s ills as problems of individual “mental health.”