"Between Sanity and Madness offers a sweeping account of psychiatry's history and its current controversies that is at once sophisticated and accessible. Readers will especially benefit from Horwitz's unparalleled expertise and unique perspective on the advantages and limitations of psychiatry's embrace of the DSM, here astutely and engagingly analyzed. The story of psychiatry's turn to biology is by now well known; Horwitz shows us that the turn to DSM-based "diagnostic psychiatry" has been just as consequential and problematic for the discipline." -- Elizabeth Lunbeck, Author of The Americanization of Narcissism "What is madness? How about mental illness? Different times and places have given enormously different answers. Allan Horwitz is among the most readable of historians of psychiatry. His deeply researched and totally arresting book explores these questions - and shows how far off track we have drifted." -- Edward Shorter, Professor of History of Medicine, Professor of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto "Horwitz demonstrates just how recalcitrant mental illness has been to historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary diagnostic systems, including those of American psychiatry today. That impressive resistance to psychological, social and biological explanations does not mean that the psychiatric treatment of the mentally ill has not improved, only that we are still in an era of uncertainty and limited knowledge which should make us humble and honest about how far we still have to go to have an adequate theory of mental illness.

A balanced, easy to read, and useful book." -- Arthur Kleinman, Author of Rethinking Psychiatry.