Psychiatry: on its best behaviour

Abstract

Psychiatry is a medical speciality: first defined by medical practitioners and often associated, in the eyes of the layperson, with medical doctors. The importance of psychiatrists, in the delivery of psychiatric services, should never be underestimated, but can be overstated. For the last 30 years psychiatric medicine has been called into question, however, by a significant number of dissident medical voices. ‘Anti-psychiatry’ is an expression of the belief that much psychiatric practice is repressive and anti-psychiatric, in the sense of a science and art concerned with ‘mental healing’. The legacy of the 1960s remains, especially in the work of Italian mental health workers, mainly psychiatrists and nurses, who have tried to return the human power to people who have been dispossessed, by society and the machinery of psychiatric treatment. People with mental health problems need care and treatment: even the so-called anti-psychiatrists acknowledged this fact. But what sort of treatment?