Marco Ramos on Misunderstanding Mental Illness

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

Ethics, Philosophy, Economics, Books, Science, Business, Courses, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Interviews, Education, History

4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2023

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When psychiatrist Marco Ramos of Yale University prescribes antidepressants to patients in distress and they ask him how they work, Ramos admits: We don't really know. And too often, they don't work at all. Despite decades of brain research and billions of dollars spent, psychiatry has made little progress in understanding mental illness. Listen as Ramos explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how the myth of the biological basis for mental illness began, why it stubbornly persists, and why honesty about what we know and don't know is the best policy.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.7	Institution.
0:13.7	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.4	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.3	We'd love to hear from you.
0:31.5	Today's January 24th, 2023, and I guess is Marco Ramos, MD PhD, a story in a medicine
0:44.6	and psychiatrist at Yale University.
0:47.1	Marco, welcome to econtalk.
0:49.3	Thank you so much for inviting me, Russ.
0:51.7	I'm delighted to be here.
0:53.0	Our topic for today is an article you wrote last spring for the Boston Review.
0:57.7	You were reviewing two histories of psychiatry.
1:00.0	The title of the article really grabbed my attention.
1:04.7	Mental illness is not in your head.
1:07.7	You may not have written that title, usually authors don't get to write their own titles,
1:12.2	but that's what your article is about.
1:17.1	For interested listeners, we've done a bunch of related econtalk episodes on this topic
1:22.1	with Gary Greenberg, Lewis Menand, and more recently on Harry.
1:26.4	You can find those in our archive.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Library of Economics and Liberty, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Library of Economics and Liberty and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.