Researchers once believed that if they could find a drug that produces madness, they could also find the cure. The Madness Pill tells the story of that search and of the man at its centre, Solomon Snyder.
Justin Garson is a philosopher and historian of science at the City University of New York. His father was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that is where the book starts. Garson follows the career of Snyder, the psychiatrist whose experiments with mind-altering drugs led to the dopamine hypothesis. That hypothesis moved a generation of researchers away from psychoanalysis and towards a search for the biological basis of schizophrenia.
How drugs shaped a theory
The book is part biography and part history of science. It draws on interviews and first-hand research. It shows how psychedelics and stimulants shaped biological psychiatry, and how the race to develop new psychiatric drugs followed from the work of Snyder.
Why it fits PsychosisNet
PsychosisNet regards the dopamine hypothesis as unproven and does not reduce psychosis to biology. If you want to see where the biological view came from, and how much of it rests on experiments with drugs, you will find the history here. The publisher presents Snyder as an unheralded genius, so read the book as history and keep asking what the theory explains and what it leaves out.
Garson earlier wrote Madness: A Philosophical Exploration.
Book details: St. Martin’s Press, 2026, 240 pages.
This book presentation is based on information from the publisher and on published reviews.
Prof. dr. Jim van Os, Chair Division Neuroscience, Utrecht University Medical Centre. Jim works at the interface of ‘hard’ brain science, health services research, art and subjective experiences of people with ‘lived experience’ in mental healthcare.
Jim has been appearing on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of ‘most influential scientific minds of our time’ since 2014. In 2014 he published his book ‘Beyond DSM-5‘, and in 2016 the book ‘Good Mental Health Care’. In 2026 he published 'Wat psychisch lijden is'.
Want to read more?
Blogs by Jim van Os can be read here
Did you know that PsychosisNet regularly posts new content?
Online tests
Compare antidepressants tool
Compare antipsychotics tool
Podcasts
Books
Comments: