The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

Going “crazy” is a pretty common theme in pop music. From Patsy Cline to Gnarls Barkley and just about every recording artist in between has a song or two about love driving a person crazy. They are a dime a dozen. But when it comes to madness, that is not a theme you typically think of when you think of popular music.

There are exceptions. Lithium by the band Nirvana is ostensibly about a man turning to religion following a romantic breakup, but the words, the title, and the juxtaposition of quiet verses and loud choruses definitely makes one think of manic depression.

And then, there is a whole double album about the descent into madness. It’s arguably the best rock concept album ever produced, and it spent 15 weeks on the charts in the US in 1979. The album sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and is recognized on the Rolling Stones list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. That album is The Wall by Pink Floyd. It spawned a movie and one of the highest grossing concert tours of all time.

The title today is a line from the song Comfortably Numb written by Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. The song was inspired by Water’s experience of receiving a tranquilizer before a performance to deal with pain and allow him to get on with the show. But in the concept of the album it’s about the injection of hallucinatory drugs. It’s a key turning point in the album’s storyline.

It’s also one of the last collaborations between Roger Waters and his Pink Floyd partner David Gilmour. Waters envisioned an orchestral rendering while Gilmour favored a more stripped-down approach. They argued but finally compromised and so we get both (the final guitar solo is Gilmour’s). The compromise was acrimonious, leaving Gilmour feeling he could not work productively with Waters anymore. You can hear that final compromise on Comfortably Numb here on YouTube.

Justin Garson’s father suffered from schizophrenia. He recounts his father’s madness, and his experience with psychiatry in the introduction to The Madness Pill. At first, in the 1970s his treatment was therapy sessions. But when his illness came back in the 1980s pills became his treatment regimen. In between his first bout with mental illness and his second, psychiatry had undergone a revolution. And one of the reasons why was the work of Dr. Solomon Snyder.

Garson’s new book centers itself on the long career of Dr. Snyder. Other scientists make their appearances as well, especially as the book enters the 1960s, but Snyder was the one whose discoveries around dopamine, dopamine receptors in the brain, and their link to schizophrenia, revolutionized psychiatry.

Born in 1938, Snyder graduated from medical school at Georgetown University in DC, specializing in psychiatry. From there he spent time at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco before landing a role as research assistant to Julius Axelrod at the National Institutes of Health. It was there where his love of laboratory science and scientific research took off. He spent decades searching for the biological roots of schizophrenia.

Garson’s book is part biography and part scientific history, and he has done an excellent job of blending the personal stories with the scientific work. Some of the experiments that Snyder and his peers conducted in the 1960s with psychedelic drugs, including LSD with themselves as the guinea pigs, shows both their dedication to the search for a solution to complex scientific problems, and the naiveite of the times.

This book has a lot in common with Off the Scales, Aimee Donnellan’s book about Ozempic and the discovery of GLP-1 drugs that I reviewed last November. Donnellan acknowledged in her book that obesity has both physical and psychological origins. Garson also acknowledges that the understanding of the chemical nature of mental illness, that Dr. Snyder played such a large role in uncovering, has led to the discovery of drugs much more capable of treating their effects. But there is a growing recognition that drugs cannot replace psychoanalysis but rather must supplement it.

This is an informative and interesting history of the late-twentieth century discoveries about the biology of schizophrenia. Read it for a window into the history of mental illness, psychiatry and our understanding of how the brain works.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐🌠

OVERALL COMMENTS: An short well-written history of the late-twentieth century discoveries about the biology of schizophrenia. Garson has done an excellent job of blending the personal with the scientific.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through NetGalley, and courtesy of the publisher St. Martin’s Press. The book is available to the public starting today, April 28, 2026.

The other books on my nightstand over the last week:

ONE BOOK I’VE READ

ONE BOOK I’M CURRENTLY READING

WHAT’S NEXT

Next week I’ll review two new books. Addicted to Anxiety is a self-help book that tackles the root cause of anxiety. The book will be released in the US next week but is already a best-seller in the UK.

Absence is a debut “speculative novel” set in a future beset by an epidemic of human vanishing. People are “popping” - suddenly disappearing into thin air. What happens when, one day, a woman long Absent reappears, claiming she’s been to the other side and back.