I’ve previously expressed some of my disquiet about the diagnostic practice in psychiatry. I am really concerned that we are widening our notions of illness far too much, and beginning to include a lot of normal experience. How else can one interpret the statistic from the recent Australian National Mental Health Survey that proposed...
I fell into psychiatry because talking to people, being allowed into their thoughts, and helping them regain order from chaos, was the part of medicine that appealed most to me during medical school. The increasingly procedural nature of the other specialties was interesting, and challenging in different ways, but the talking seemed more me. Then...
It’s the worst thing we could have done: years back psychiatry “rebranded” itself as “Mental Health Services” – a pernicious and meaningless phrase. Now I’m beginning to think that in order to save psychiatry as a profession, as a medical specialty, we need a divorce. It’s not you, it’s me … Well actually, it’s some of...
One of the things that frustrates me the most, working in my acute outpatient team, is follow-up once the situation is no longer acute. Few of our patients have the wherewithal to afford even the gap payment between the Medicare subsidy and the charges of private practitioners, and the other teams within our service...
There’s a piece in New Scientist about the controversy surrounding the development of the DSM V – the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (5th edition). The article and an accompanying editorial make for very interesting reading. The DSM is one of the two major diagnostic manuals in use; the other is the ICD...
