This book starts with the Greeks 2,500 years ago and ends with the present of DSM-IV. The organization is chronological and by country or groups of countries until the twentieth century, when the exponential growth of the healing sciences results in too much material from too many countries to merit such organization. For each century and era, Dr.

Stone not only points out major trends, movements, and contributing forces that set the tone of the time, but also describes the positions and publications of influential individuals and shares interesting and odd tidbits on the treatment of the mentally ill.

The history of psychiatry in the twentieth century is arranged by decade and major fields, including diagnosis and epidemiology, psychoanalysis, general and hospital psychiatry, personality disorders, biological psychiatry, child psychiatry, forensics, and philosophy as it relates to the mind. In the section on 1980 to 1995, the reader will find a comprehensive overview of the current practice of psychiatry.

Dr. Stone begins with a look at the role of religion in healing the mind and ends with some tentative predictions about the practice of psychiatry in the twenty-first century.