The Broken Brain provides a complete and remarkably readable guide to the new scientific understanding of schizophrenia, severe depression, and other major mental disorders and to the new medications that have already returned hundreds of thousands to more normal lives. Dr. Andreasen's book is also a social manifesto that seeks to remove the shame, guilt, and punishment that are still attached to the mentally ill and, instead, to regard them ''as human beings who deserve as much sensitivity and love as people who suffer from cancer, muscular dystrophy, or heart disease.''