He studied mental illness for 50 years. Andrew Scull, is a professor of sociology and science studies at UC San Diego and an expert on the history of mental illness. The author of numerous books that delve into human psychoses and their treatments, Andrew Scull graduated from Oxford University in 1969 and arrived in Americe not long after the 'Community Mental Health Act of 1963 began to shutter hundreds of custodian institutions around the country. Community health Centers and treatment programs were meant to fill in that void by providing education and job training for the intellectually disabled. Yet today's crises in homelessness and mental health make clear that these goals were either never achieved or simply abandoned. Scull's work was initially driven by one simple question:  "Why did society imagine that institutionalizing people was so important, and why was so much capital-intellectual and financial-Devoted to this end?"  The search for answers made Scull, a professor of sociology and science studies at UC San Diego, a singular authority on more than 200 years of the medical profession's -Tangled relationship with mental illness. In delineating this history - From asylums to psycho-pharmacology-he considers the challenge that individuals with mental illness pose for the health of a modern society. Yet he knows how solutions are elusive and still far out of reach.