Watch: Mysteries of Mental Illness

PBS’s four-part 2021 series Mysteries of Mental Illness tells two histories at once: the changing scientific effort to understand mental distress, and society’s repeated decisions about who counts as ill, dangerous, deviant or “normal”. Contemporary first-person accounts keep that history from becoming a procession of theories and institutions.

It is worth watching as a series because each episode complicates the previous one. The central thread is not a triumphant march from superstition to certainty. Psychiatry has learned a great deal, but diagnosis still depends on observed experience and behaviour, while treatment is shaped by culture, law, money and the availability of care. Pay particular attention to the gap between giving a condition a name and explaining its biological mechanism.

Episode 1, “Evil or Illness”, moves from ancient spiritual explanations to the emergence of psychiatry, alongside people living with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Episode 2, “Who’s Normal?”, examines the struggle to make diagnosis empirical, the history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and the social values hidden inside apparently clinical boundaries.

Episode 3, “Rise and Fall of the Asylum”, follows American institutions from reforming ambition to neglect and closure, ending with prisons functioning as unintended mental-health facilities.

Episode 4, “New Frontiers”, considers treatments including deep-brain stimulation while stressing that biology, environment, family history and individual experience resist a single explanation.