This is a well-researched book that upends the table on modern psychiatry and its honored pioneers. She also questions the nature of proof, as opposed to mere correlation, and proposes that traditional mechanisms for establishing proof must be supplemented with modern tools and strategies. Washington’s book, organized in seven thorough chapters, traces the growing incidence of microbial triggers of mental disease. As a result of a change in direction, researchers are facing a possible paradigm shift that replaces psychosocial factors with biologic ones as the cause of a large portion of mental disorders. Mental illness has long been the stepchild of medicine-a terrifying set of disease states that you can’t identify on a slide under a microscope. Washington tackles in her new book, Infectious Madness. It is an unnerving supposition that otherwise healthy people can “catch” mental illness, one that National Book Circle Award winner Harriet A. Some researchers in the field are now estimating that infectious organisms cause from 10% to 75% of serious mental disorders. While contemporary researchers across the globe continue to unearth the microbial origins of physical illnesses, a new theory on mental illness has quietly emerged, not without its share of controversy. The relationship between disease and microbes was first proposed in the 17th century, but the basic standards for proving that infection causes disease were not laid down until 1883, when the German bacteriologists Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler provided the first evidence of the processes underlying germ theory.

Infectious madness harriet washington