| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present. By E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. xvi, 416 pp. Cloth, $28.00, ISBN 0-8135-3003-2. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4207-2.)

In The Invisible Plague, E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller turn to history to buttress the research and advocacy that has been part of Torrey's sometimes controversial thirty-year campaign to prove that severe mental illnesses are a relatively recent phenomena and that they are caused by biological rather than social factors. Torrey and Miller comb literary analyses, government reports, and detailed census surveys and asylum records from England (often including Wales), Ireland, the Atlantic provinces of Canada, and the United States. They argue that rates of insanity have been steadily increasing over the last 250 years in those English speaking countries and that this real epidemic—what they term a plague of brain dysfunction that hides behind such labels as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness—has been rendered invisible by its slow, insidious onset and by an intellectual mind-set that prefers to see severe mental illnesses as mere social constructions.

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