Psychiatry: Past, Present, and Prospect

Psychiatry: Past, Present, and Prospect brings together perspectives from a group of highly respected psychiatrists, each with decades of experience in clinical practice. The topics covered range from scientific discoveries of all kinds, advances in treatment, and conceptual breakthroughs. The highlights are countered by the field's negative sides: perennial indecisiveness about the boundaries of psychiatry; the limitations of a narrow approach to human suffering; the retreat from the hope of a de-institutionalised, community-based psychiatry; the divide between biological treatments and psychotherapy; the technical and ethical complexities of psychiatric research; and the low priority given to psychiatry, especially but far from exclusively in less developed countries. The result is a text full of collected wisdom which will promote the curiosity of mental health professionals about key developments in psychiatry over the past half century; sensitize the next generation of mental health professionals to the role they might play in advancing the state of knowledge about mental illness and its treatment during the course of their careers; and serve as a valuable archival resource for scholars. This collection of viewpoints from very experienced leaders in the field of psychiatry will prove fascinating reading for psychiatrists and allied mental health professionals, such as psychologists, psychiatric social workers, psychiatric nurses and occupational therapists, both trained and in training. It will also offer the interested laity a balanced account of psychiatry's evolution since the 1950s, and its likely prospects in the 21st century. Psychiatry - just like individuals - should ask itself the central existential questions: Where am I now? Where do I come from? Where am I going? This book gives quite a few nuanced and thought-provoking answers to these questions that we psychiatrists should engage ourselves thoroughly with occassionally... The result is a very knowledgeable, readable and critical/charming review of psychiatry's development - knowledge-based, action-related and attitudinal. Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association This is a thought-provoking book on the developments in psychiatry since the 1950s, both good and bad, and how they have affected present-day practice and the future course of psychiatry... Readers may not agree with every expert's opinion, but the book provides welcome food for thought. Doody's Notes1. Neuroscience ; 2. Psychiatric genetics ; 3. Clinical research with a focus on schizophrenia ; 4. Epidemiology and causality ; 5. Cultural psychiatry ; 6. Community psychiatry ; 7. Psychiatry in developing countries ; 8. Mental health law ; 9. Psychiatric ethics ; 10. Diagnosis and classification ; 11. Consultation-liaison psychiatry ; 12. Child and adolescent psychiatry ; 13. Psychiatry of the elderly ; 14. Forensic psychiatry ; 15. Psychological trauma ; 16. The addictions ; 17. Personality disorders ; 18. Psychopharmacology ; 19. Convulsive therapies ; 20. Cognitive-behaviour therapy ; 21. Psychodynamic psychiatry