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The Madness Pill: One Doctor’s Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

St. Martin’s Press, April 2026

A rollicking history of a brilliant doctor who used mind-altering drugs in the Sixties to induce schizophrenia as a way to find a cure for the disease.

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The
Madness
Pill

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.

Centered around Solomon Snyder, the psychiatrist who ultimately did identify the madness pill, and the community of doctors and researchers he worked with, THE MADNESS PILL recounts the drug-fueled quest to cure schizophrenia. A wunderkind who started medical school at 19, Snyder worked steadily for decades to replicate the illness, ultimately finding in 1970 that amphetamines could trigger a schizophrenia-like state by flooding the brain with dopamine. Five years later, he went on to discover the dopamine receptor and proved that antipsychotic drugs work by disabling dopamine neurons. Snyder’s dopamine hypothesis inspired a generation of researchers to part ways with psychoanalysis and look for the biological basis of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Using first-hand research and interviews, THE MADNESS PILL is at once a raucous history and insightful portrait of a remarkable scientist who turned psychiatry into a respected science by transforming how mental illness is treated.

Reviews

The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

“A riveting, sometimes unnerving read. It takes us far into the lived history and effects of hallucinogens, amphetamines, and a range of other street drugs, and assesses their foundational importance to psychiatric research at the time.”
Christopher Lane, Psychology Today
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

“…echoing Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks… Thoroughly readable science that rests on solid archival discoveries."
Library Journal, starred review
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

"An enlightening biography of a titan of neuroscience and a fascinating guide to how mental illness takes shape in the brain."
Robert Kolker
Author of the #1 NYT bestseller Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

“With style and insight, Garson has spun a riveting tale of the man whose unruly experiments revolutionized psychiatry. This was a thrilling read from the first to the last word.”
Audrey Clare Farley
Author of Girls and their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

“A timely, gripping and deeply informed narrative about the search to understand and treat psychosis, the most unsettling of psychiatric conditions. It’s a problem on many minds, as mayors and governors across the country struggle to shape meaningful mental health policies. Driven by his own father’s battle with paranoid schizophrenia, Garson offers us invaluable illumination.”
Daniel Bergner
Author of The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches.
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

"A fun, fast-paced, fascinating account of one of the most influential figures in the rise of biological psychiatry. Garson's book will leave readers reflecting on what it means to suffer, go mad, and be human."
Laura Delano
Author of Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia

“The Madness Pill is a page-turning biography of a complex giant in the field of biological psychiatry — Solomon Snyder — but it is also so much more. Through Snyder’s story, Garson traces how drugs — from LSD to amphetamines to opioids to antipsychotics — were used to test different theories of madness and addiction, ultimately helping to secure psychiatry’s “chemical” turn. The legacies of the fascinating and fateful experiments told in this book still shape psychiatry today.”
Anne Harrington
Author of Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

About Me

Justin is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and a contributor for PsychologyToday.com, Aeon, and MadInAmerica.com. He writes on the philosophy of madness, evolution of the mind, and purpose in nature.

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Featured Article

Introduction to The Madness Pill

Mad in America published an excerpt of the book’s introduction, in which I talk about my father’s schizophrenia diagnosis and how it led me to a forgotten chapter of psychiatry’s history.