Psychiatry: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine that studies and treats mental and emotional disorders (see mental illness). The term alienist is an old term for a psychiatrist, and the term shrink is a (sometimes offensive) slang term for a psychotherapist.

Note that psychiatry is practiced by psychiatrists, psychology by psychologists. Psychiatrists are medical doctors and may prescribe drugs, while psychologists have extensive training in therapy and psychological testing, and do not prescribe drugs.

Mind versus brain

Psychiatric illnesses were for some time characterised as disorders of function of the mind rather than the brain, although the distinction is not always obvious. In the current state of knowledge this distinction does not hold true, as most psychiatric conditions have their correlates in term of brain abnormality.

For a long period of history, neurology and psychiatry were a single discipline, and following their division the steady advance in understanding of the basic functioning of neurons and the brain is bringing areas of the two disciplines back together.

Psychiatry was at first a pragmatic discipline that was part of general medicine, combining medicine and practical psychology. The work of Emil Kraepelin laid the foundations of scientific psychiatry, but was derailed by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. For many years, Freudian theories dominated psychiatric thinking.

The discovery of lithium carbonate as a treatment for bipolar disorder, followed by the development of fields such as molecular biology and tools such as brain imaging has led to psychiatry re-discovering its origins in physical and observational medicine without losing sight of its humane dimension.

Unlike most other areas of medicine, there is a politicised anti-psychiatry movement that opposes the practices of, and in some cases the existence of, psychiatry. Some opponents of psychiatry state that selective financing by large multinational drug companies of both high ranking professional psychiatrists, research and educational material has led the practice of psychiatry to be subversively, and in some cases inhumanely, misled. These claims are strongly contested by psychiatrists.

Psychiatrists:

• Eugene Bleuler
• John Cade
• Milton Erickson
• Sigmund Freud
• David Healy
• Karl Jaspers
• Carl Gustav Jung
• Radovan Karadžić
• Antoni Kepinski
• Emil Kraepelin
• Richard von Krafft-Ebbing
• W. H. R. Rivers
• Kurt Schneider

Others:

• Kay Redfield Jamison - a psychologist who, whilst not a psychiatrist herself, is professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a MacArthur Fellow.

• Dr. Alistair Crown in Bernice Rubens' novel A Solitary Grief (1991)
• Dr. Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night
• Dr. Igor in Paulo Coelho's novel Veronika Decides to Die
• The radio talk-show presenter Dr Frasier Crane in the sit-com Frasier
• Hannibal Lecter from Thomas Harris's books

Links moved from medicine, to be sorted and explained: Bipolar disorder -- Depression -- Mental Retardation -- Schizophrenia -- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder -- More...