Last edited on January 27, 2024

History of Psychiatry

The History of Psychiatry is important for all physicians to understand. Progress in mental health care has not always been in a straight line, and patients have also suffered because of this (e.g. - lobotomy and indiscriminate use of ECT). Understanding historical treatments and views of mental illness informs the care we provide today, and is important for all physicians.

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History

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“Imagine turning the clock back ten thousand years and allowing human civilization to again develop agriculture, writing, science, medicine, and, finally, something resembling psychiatry. Then we wait till this psychiatry‐like discipline decides to write a diagnostic manual and we get a copy of this manual. We then repeat this experiment 100 times and classify the resulting categories alongside our current DSM‐5 and ICD‐10. What will we find? My intuition (and those of many with whom I have shared this thought experiment) is that a substantial proportion of our current categories will not be represented reliably in these manuals. Unlike the elements in the periodic table, our current menu of psychiatric disorders would not likely be consistently rediscovered.”

– Kenneth S. Kendler^[1]

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See also: Horwitz, A. V. (2010). How an age of anxiety became an age of depression. The Milbank Quarterly, 88(1), 112-138.

See main article: History of the DSM

See main article: Cognitive Biases, Misdiagnosis, Iatrogenesis, and Overdiagnosis

Diagnostic Fads in psychiatry are a recurring theme, due to limitations of diagnosing based on subjective symptoms and the lack of reliable biomarkers.^[2]^[3] Recent diagnostic fads include: pediatric bipolar disorder and multiple personality disorder.^[4]

“Normal is a setting on a washing machine.” ― Christopher Barzak

Critical Psychiatry is a movement within and outside psychiatry that critiques commonly held beliefs in academic psychiatry, such as biological etiologies of mental illness, role of psychiatry in social control, and . Critical psychiatry is not anti-psychiatry, and the positions of critical psychiatrists vary greatly, which makes the term difficult to define. It is also important to note that critical psychiatry is not anti-psychiatry, but there may be individuals who overlap between the two camps.^[5]