Skip to content

From the archives

Dangerous Grounds

Coming soon to a democracy near you

The Collapse of Syria

The story of a nation’s unravelling, one neighbourhood at a time

Trompe Le Toil

The modern conundrum of overwork

Edward Shorter

Edward Shorter is professor of the history of medicine and professor of psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Toronto. One of his recent books is Before Prozac: The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2008). His latest book, Endocrine Psychiatry, co-authored with Max Fink, has just been published by Oxford.

Articles by
Edward Shorter

Psychiatric Turf War

Social versus neurological explanations for delusion September 2014
Joel and Ian Gold are brothers. Joel, a psy­chiatrist and psychoanalyst, teaches in New York. Ian, a PhD in psychology and philosophy, is at McGill University. They are part of a movement to drag psychiatry away from neurochemical thinking and to restore a place for social causation of illness, rather than just neurotransmitters that are out of…

Smart Bombs and Sex Robots

Is military technology driving the new hedonism? May 2010
Peter Nowak, a science and technology journalist for the CBC, has written a worthy successor to Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion’s 1948 classic Mechanization Takes Command. Interestingly, Nowak does not even mention Giedion, yet the basic ingredients are here: a magisterial overview of the remorselessness of technology combined with a thoughtful assessment of the economic…