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Psychiatry, the medically-based practice of psychology, draws on a wide range of sources including clinical practice itself and the many different psychological models of the mind. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who takes further training in psychology. Some medical schools favour a purely clinical approach, based on traditional diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. They will be particularly concerned with a person\'s pathology, abnormal mental thoughts and their connection to symptoms. Others favour early introduction to psychological principles showing how human behaviour may be governed by unconscious processes, and relating these to interpersonal relationships and their consequences in people\'s lives and behaviour, where the patient is seen not just as a collection of mechanical systems, but more as a human being with his or her own social history.
Many disorders treated by psychiatry have a clinical, physical component; dementia, organic brain disease and the delirium tremens suffered by alcoholics. In other cases, classification in psychiatric illness is based on observable features of the mental illness (that is, of the depression or anxiety). The main areas of psychological disturbance dealt with in psychiatry are schizophrenia, affective disorders such as anxiety, depression, mania and hypomania, organic states like delirium and dementia, hysteria, the personality disorders of people who are psychopaths or have abnormal personalities, obsessional disorders, addiction and subnormality. Clinical psychology is the study of disease as it relates to mental illness. MJ
Further reading W. Mayer Gross, , E. Slater and , M. Roth, Clinical Psychiatry; , James Willis, Lecture Notes on Psychiatry. |
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