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.