PSYCHIATRY IN CRISIS:
AT THE CROSSROADS OF SOCIAL SCIENCES,
THE HUMANITIES, AND NEUROSCIENCE
Published by Springer Nature (2021)
by
The
field of academic psychiatry is in crisis, everywhere. It is not
merely a health crisis of resource scarcity or distribution, competing
claims and practice models, or level of development from one country to
another, but a deeper, more fundamental crisis about the very
definition and the theoretical basis of psychiatry. The kinds of
questions that represent this crisis include whether psychiatry is a social science (like psychology or anthropology), whether it is better understood as part of the humanities (like philosophy, history, and literature), or if the future of psychiatry is best assured as a branch of medicine (based on genetics and neuroscience)? In fact, the question often debated since the beginning of modern psychiatry concerns the biomedical model
so that part of psychiatry’s perpetual self-questioning is to what
extent it is or is not a branch of medicine. This unique and bold volume
offers a representative and critical survey of the history of modern
psychiatry with deeply informed transdisciplinary readings of the
literature and practices of the field by two professors of psychiatry
who are active in practice and engaged in research and have dual
training in scientific psychiatry and philosophy. In alternating
chapters presenting contrasting arguments for the future of psychiatry,
the two authors conclude with a dialogue between them to flesh out the
theoretical, research, and practical implications of psychiatry’s
current crisis, outlining areas of divergence, consensus, and fruitful
collaborations to revision psychiatry today. The volume is scrupulously
documented but written in accessible language with capsule summaries of
key areas of theory, research, and practice for the student and
practitioner alike in the social and human sciences and in medicine,
psychiatry, and the neurosciences.
No comments:
Post a Comment