The loss of reason, a sense of alienation from the common-sense world we all like to imagine we inhabit, the shattering emotional turmoil that can seize hold of some of us: these are a part of our shared human experience whatever culture we come from. Nowadays, mental disturbance is most commonly (though not always) viewed through a medical lens, but human beings have also always sought to make sense of the depredations of madness through invocations of the religious and the supernatural, or to construct psychological and social accounts in an effort to tame the demons of Unreason.

Through twelve chapters organized chronologically, from antiquity to today, from the Bible to Freud, from exorcism to mesmerism, from Bedlam to Victorian asylums, from the theory of humours to modern pharmacology, Andrew Scull writes compellingly of the manifestations of madness, its meanings, its consequences and our attempts to treat it.