The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself.While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins.Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity-specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness.Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it. Cantered around Solomon Snyder, the psychiatrist who ultimately did identify the madness pill, and the community of doctors and researchers he worked with, THE MADNESS PILL recounts the drug-fuelled quest to cure schizophrenia.A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, Snyder worked steadily for decades to replicate the illness, ultimately finding in 1970 that amphetamines could trigger a schizophrenia-like state by flooding the brain with dopamine.Five years later, he went on to discover the dopamine receptor and proved that antipsychotic drugs work by dis