Psychiatrist - Definition


Psychiatrist - Definition

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 (from "head shrinker") 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. Psychology is the broader study of behaviour and thought processes not just in the context of mental health. Clinical psychologists specialise in mental health and have extensive training in therapy and psychological testing, they do not usually prescribe drugs.

Contents

1 Mind versus brain

2 Anti-psychiatry

3 Famous figures in psychiatry

4 Psychiatrists in fiction

5 See also

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 always hold true, as many psychiatric conditions have physical etiologies.

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.

Anti-psychiatry

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.

Famous figures in psychiatry

Psychiatrists

Alfred Adler Individual psychology
Aaron Beck cognitive therapy
Eugene Bleuler diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia
Ian Brockington nosological pioneer
John Cade introduced lithium
Ugo Cerletti electroconvulsive therapy
Edmund Chiu Huntington's chorea
Timothy Crow biological basis of schizophrenia
Pierre Deniker introduced chlorpromazine
Leon Eisenberg Psychiatric anthropology
Milton Erickson hypnosis
Jean Etienne Esquirol descriptive psychopathology and postnatal depression
Frantz Fanon effect of discrimination on an individual
Daniel X Freedman
Christopher Paul Lindsay Freeman electroconvulsive therapy
Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalysis
Max Hamilton introduced depression and anxiety scales
David Healy influence of pharmaceuticals
Ashoka Jahnavi-Prasad introduced sodium valproate as a safer alternative to lithium
Pierre Janet intoduced the concept of dissociation
Karl Jaspers phenomenologist
Eve Johnstone brain changes in schizophrenia
Maxwell Jones therapeautic community
Carl Gustav Jung analytical psychology
Seymour Kety pioneer in psychiatric genetics
Eric R. Kandel
Radovan Karadžić
Robert Evan Kendell diagnostic problems in psychiatry
Antoni Kepinski
Arthur Klienmen psychiatric anthropologist
Emil Kraepelin pioneer of psychiatry
Richard von Krafft-Ebbing
Norman Krietman psychiatric epidemiology
R. D. Laing antipsychiatry movement
Sir Aubrey Lewis nosological pioneer
Alwyn Lishman neuropsychiatrist
Peter McGuffin psychiatric geneticist
Adolf Meyer psychobiology
Egas Moniz psychosurgery
John Nemiah psychotherapist
Ian Oswald sleep research
Eugene Paykel life events and mental illness
Ivan Pavlov pioneer of conditioning behavior
Philippe Pinel abolished all retraint in psychiatric treatment
W. H. R. Rivers psychiatric anthropologist
Sir Martin Roth psychiatry of old age
Sir Michael Rutter child psychiatry
Kurt Schneider diagnostic criteria
Mogens Schou lithium therapy
Peter Sifneos
Elliott Slater psychiatric epidemiologist
Robert Spitzer diagnostic criteria
Harry Stack Sullivan interpersonal psychiatry
Thomas Szasz antipsychiatry movement
Eng Seong Tan cross cultural psychiatry
Fuller Torrey Humane treatment of schizophrenia
Ming Tsuang psychiatric geneticist
Ladislas von Meduna pharmacoconvulsions
Julius Wagner-Jauregg malarial treatment of GPI
Sula Wolff children under stress

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.

Psychiatrists in fiction

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
Dr. Tobias Funke in the sitcom Arrested Development

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