An urgent rethinking of the Western approach to mental health, which treats the symptoms rather than the exploitative systems causing our distress--by a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School physician-anthropologist--offering lessons from the rest of the world. In Empire of Madness, Dr. Khameer Kidia offers a re-evaluation of mental health in the Global North, where the answer to the structural causes of mental distress, like racism and economic inequality, has been to medicate the symptoms rather than revolutionize those causal structures. A clinician and researcher whose own mother suffers from the psychological harm of colonialism, Kidia reports from the front lines of mental health crises at home, in clinical practice and during fieldwork, highlighting the flaws in how we cope with global mental distress. Western psychiatry, which emerged during nineteenth-century colonialism and expanded under neoliberalism, mollifies the effects--depression, anxiety, hunger, poverty--of