The Mind Fixers
The Mind Fixers was a seven-part series of newspaper stories by Jon Franklin which won the award for Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1985, first appearing in the Baltimore Evening Sun in July 1984. The series explores the science of molecular psychiatry as an alternative to psychoanalysis since Freud, dismissing the latter as "surrounded by an aura of witchcraft, proceeding on impression and hunch, often ineffective, it was the bumbling and sometimes humorous stepchild of modern science." Based upon interviews with more than fifty scientists, Franklin takes a generally optimistic point of view, looking forward to the possibility of "psychic engineering" when psychiatry becomes an "exact science" with "specialized drugs".