Faculty Books

As a medical field, psychiatry is uniquely controversial. The question has been raised as to whether mental illness even exists, or if the disorders we treat simply represent variations of normal characteristics along the wide spectrum of emotions, reactions, and behaviors that human beings exhibit. We have floundered in our efforts to classify disorders, and many say that psychiatry has pathologized everything from routine discomfort to bad behavior. We have no definitive blood tests or x-rays to confirm any of our diagnoses, and the efficacy of our treatments has been questioned. While our efforts have brought us closer to consensus about what treatments work for what problems, we still have a long way to go.

Psychiatrists agree on a few things: we all agree that mental illness exists and that some of our treatments help some of our patients some of the time. It's hard enough that those outside our field express skepticism, if not anger, and often pass judgment on our patients who come looking for help and on those of us who try to help them, but amongst ourselves, psychiatrists disagree about some very basic issues in our field. We disagree about how to distribute care in a world with limited resources, about how psychiatric diagnoses are defined, and about who deserves special considerations and financial support because of their illnesses.   We do not have a consensus about the role of addictive medications and alternative therapies in the treatment of psychiatric diseases. And finally, we don't have a consensus about how to respond to those who have unified against our field.

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Reproduced with permission of the author.