Tag: Psychiatry and Psychology
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The beginnings of humane psychiatry: Pinel and the Tukes
JMS PearceHull, England “It is perhaps not going too far to maintain that Pinel has been to eighteenth-century psychiatry what Newton was to its natural philosophy and Linnaeus to its taxonomy.”—George Rousseau, Historian, 1991 Although modern treatment of mental illness has its limitations, older methods of treatment were both crude and cruel. For centuries they…
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Trauma stewardship
Laura LipskyConnie BurkSeattle, Washington, United States This article was excerpted and adapted from Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others © 2009 Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. For more information about the book and this work, please visit the Trauma Stewardship website. “Are you sure all this trauma work hasn’t…
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Géricault’s art of insanity
Caitlin MeyerScotland “Now I am disoriented and confused. I try in vain to find support; nothing seems solid, everything escapes me, deceives me. Our earthly hopes and desires are only vain fancies, our successes mere mirages that we try to grasp,” scrawled Théodore Géricault in a letter to his friend Dedreux-Dorcy in 1810.1 A master…
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Screenwriting: psychiatry in reverse
Stephen PottsEdinburgh, United Kingdom Introduction The subject matter of medicine is inherently dramatic. Decisions taken by professionals who are highly skilled, but still human and therefore flawed, are applied to suffering patients in situations of pressure and can have radically diverse outcomes: life or death; disability or cure: a healthy baby born to a healthy…
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The psychiatrist in literature
Solomon Posen Good girls didn’t go to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists were people who testified in court on behalf of murderers or who nannied film stars. They were themselves charlatans, ratbags, sex-obsessed, evil and/or mad (Coombs 1990: 26). Within three years of graduation some 5% of doctors emerging from British medical schools elect to become psychiatrists and…
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Sectioned
Shaili JainMenlo Park, California, United States Liverpool, Great Britain, 1999 In 1999, during my residency in Liverpool, England, I had the experience of observing a supervising psychiatrist make a home visit to a severely mentally ill patient and arrange for her involuntary hospitalization, a process referred to in England as sectioning.1 I was greatly impressed…
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Uncle and nephew: Alcohol-related dementia
Sergei JarginMoscow, Russia This essay is a composite of several stories published by different authors on the subject of alcohol induced dementia. It concerns two men, an uncle and his nephew. The uncle was more muscular than the nephew. The nephew had started binge drinking at the age of twelve and had obviously damaged his…
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Honorio Delgado: A Latin-American psychiatrist, citizen of the world
Renato AlarcónLima, Perú A sad fact in the history of medicine has been the benign neglect dealt to psychiatry by the rest of the profession. This has been even more painful within psychiatry itself, as its predominantly European and North American quarters practically ignored contributions from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That is why the…
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The poetics of the body
Rachel BaerPennsylvania, United States Pathographies are narratives that describe the intimate emotional effects of illness and disability. Body Story, a creative work in which Julia K. De Pree shares her experience with anorexia, exemplifies this type of writing. According to the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Eating Disorders Association, anorexia is an…