Since the 1960s, we have been living in an era characterized by the perception that drugs can cure the problems nowadays called "mental illnesses"; problems that were previously known by terms such as insanity, madness, paranoia, and neurosis. By the word "cure," I mean the perception that drugs can improve symptoms by helping to correct the underlying pathological mechanism that is presumed to cause them. This way of thinking is spreading, increasingly, beyond psychiatry, and drugs have come to be considered as having a therapeutic role in all situations where people feel they are not efficient or not functioning as well as they should. Such situations are "diagnosed" as depression, dysthymia, anxiety, social phobia, substance abuse, compulsive shopping disorder, premenstrual syndrome, etc., and medications are prescribed to address them. The story of how we came to see drugs in this way, that is, as specific treatments for specific mental disorders (or collections of symptoms), and the question of whether this way of thinking is correct or justified, is the subject of this book.  ​ Joanna Moncrieff  teaches in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at University College London, and is one of the founding members of the Critical Psychiatry Network.