NEUROTRANSMISSION documents the controversial and emotionally charged arena of mental health and psychiatric treatment. JASON THOMPSON considers the ongoing debate concerning the nature of mental disorder, based on the state-of-the-art in psychology, psychiatry and contemporary culture. Is mental illness directly analogous to physical illness, caused by specific dysfunctions in genetics or brain biochemistry? Or is madness in the eye of the beholder, a normative social construct? What does it mean to be “sane,” anyway, in a world riven by social pathologies? NEUROTRANSMISSION considers the spectrum of dialog on these timeworn yet urgent questions, from the perspectives of psychiatry, psychology, the arts, philosophy and cultural anthropology, striving to capture the latest understandings of both mental illness and health in the developed west and beyond.