Books by Allan V. Horwitz

Since the earliest medical, philosophical, and literary texts in ancient civilizations, madness has posed some basic issues: how to separate sanity from insanity, to distinguish mental and bodily illnesses, and to specify the variety of internal and external forces that lead people to become mentally ill. This book explores the answers to these questions that have emerged over time and concludes that current portrayals are not much improved compared to those thatemerged thousands of years ago. The puzzles that madness presents are likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever.

In What's Normal?, Allan Horwitz examines the roles that biological and social forces play in determining human behavior. Rather than attempting to solve these issues universally, Horwitz demonstrates that both social and biological mechanisms have varying degrees of influence in different situations.

In this book Allan Horwitz views mental illness within a sociological framework of deviance and social control and evaluates communal and individualistic styles of therapeutic control.

In this critique of modern psychiatry, Allan V. Horwitz examines conceptions of mental illness as a disease. Presenting case studies in maladies, he examines the major causes and treatments of mental illness, paying special attention to the use of pharmaceuticals.

Recognising that depression is a devastating illness that affects some people, this book argues that the increased prevalence of major depressive disorder is due not to a genuine rise in mental disease, as many claim, but to the way that normal human sadness has been "pathologised" since 1980.