Exhilaratingly covering two centuries of developments on both sides of the Atlantic, this ambitious study deftly combines a series of profiles of leading mind doctors - from Pinel, who pioneered talking therapy during the French Revolution, to Lacan and Laing - with tracing how particular mental disorders (hysteria for Charcot and Freud, for example) preoccupied theorists as cultural fashions and definitions of madness, normality and appropriate female behaviour shifted. Starting with Mary Lamb, the patients considered are often either authors themselves or the inspiration for plays or novels; and Appignanesi, who writes fiction as well as non-fiction, excels in depicting such figures as Virginia Woolf, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. After the 1960s, however, the book, still assured in analysing trends, lacks the celebrity case studies and potted lives of shrinks that have previously made it so riveting. The final attack on the increasing reliance on drug-based treatments would arguably work better as a separate, more polemical book.