“Panic Diaries is a wonderful book. . .” — David Healy, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
“[A] richly detailed cultural history of the play of ideas, interests, research, technologies and experiments involved in the constitution of panic as an object of scientific, governmental, military, corporate, and individual enquiry and preoccupation.” — Valérie de Courville Nicol, Canadian Journal of Sociology Online
“[A] treatise that will be of value to scholars interested in the topics of trauma, anxiety, stress, alienation, and other forms of mental disturbance.” — Arthur G. Neal, Journal of American Culture
“[B]rilliantly inventive. . . . Though [Orr] makes a compelling argument about the manipulation of ‘panic’ by everyone, from transnational drug companies to the entire field of psychiatry, it’s her personal revelations that will cut right through you in this remarkable read.” — Diane Anderson-Minshall, Curve
“[Orr’s] deadly serious comic writing veers between eloquent and arresting, making this a difficult book to recommend to those who are seeking a straightforward history of the anxiolytics and their ilk, but one that is highly recommended for those seeking deeply contextualized and highly situated knowledge, those who admire experiments with form and content, and those who are interested in the cultural salience of panic and its history.” — Nancy D. Campbell, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences
“In a renewed climate of panic over terrorism, Orr’s study makes a timely contribution to the social history of mental disorders. It also adds to the growing range of scholarship that is critical of the insidious relationship between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.” — Erika Dyck, Social History of Medicine,
“Jackie Orr develops an experimental writing praxis that is as creative as it is rigorous in her distinctive Panic Diaries. . . . Jackie Orr’s work on an affective ‘disorder’ . . . has much to contribute to feminist theory and sociological critiques of science, medicine and psychiatry. Her unique contribution also sets the bar high for developing affective modes of expression.” — Melissa Autumn White, TOPIA
“This is an important book about psychiatric research, terror, and the social sciences; and it is a moving piece of experimental scholarship on the history of a feeling state.” — Elizabeth Bromley, Anthropological Quarterly
“Jackie Orr is one of sociology’s most inventive theorists. Here in Panic Diaries she is brilliantly interdisciplinary, joining social theory with rigorous historical research, feminist criticism, and science studies to give us a genealogy of panic from its invention in nineteenth-century social science to its late-twentieth-century medicalization as panic disorder. And more, all of this is cut through with autobiographic experimental writing that makes your heart beat faster—a first-hand experience of panic. A book to read, a book to teach.” — Patricia Ticineto Clough, author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology
“Packed with original interpretations of historical material, textually innovative, and theoretically brilliant, this book is full of mind-blowing insights for anyone interested in the science and culture of panic.” — Emily Martin, author of The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction