I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

There are really exciting things happening in genetic and neurobiology right now, and really looking at the ways in which different not just illnesses, but social conditions and social pressures can actually lead to actual brain changes.

I think President [Barack] Obama is exactly right, we need to combat [gun shoots] because this really can become the new normal, but that`s really what`s been happening.

I'm a practicing psychiatrist and I think that I really believe in the advances of psychiatry. Our diagnoses are more precise.

Depression as one example is an illness that has a chemical basis, but also is deeply embedded in cultural norms about gender, social class, race.

Particularly with schizophrenia you see a lot of concern that these people could escape and kill people, or they could threaten our political order.