Review by lee_eisenberg

Sammy Lee's "Stairway to Light" looks at Philippe Pinel, who revolutionized how people deal with mental illness. This story is important nowadays because of how we see mentally ill people treated like criminals. Part of this is lack of understanding of mental illness, but it's mostly police forces that get trained to treat everything as a crime with no nuance. Does a cop have to kill a mentally ill relative of a celebrity or politician before the police get forced to treat mental illness as a health issue?

Anyway, this was the first time that I had ever heard of Philippe Pinel. Everyone who cares about studying mental illness should heed his advice. "Stairway to Light" isn't a great short, but a good introduction to Pinel's work.