Dr. Robert Michels discusses the future of Psychiatry in an interview. A quote:
Psychiatry begins at the end of the 18th century with the medicalization of a group of people who were seen as strange by the rest of the citizens in the world. And that medicalization led to many things. One is it lead to their humane treatment. Previously, it wasn’t uncommon to see people that today we consider psychiatry patients, who’d be chained in institutions to keep them away from society.
It led to an attempt to study what was the nature of their problems, to describe them. It led to people talking to them instead of jeering at them or reviling them.
And it led to the development of more knowledge about the cause, the course and what factors might influence their disturbances. So it led to treatments. Within a 100 years those treatments were beginning to be…quite effective. We learned that some of them suffered from diseases we could cure.
At the turn of the century before this one…in nineteen hundred … a third of the patients in mental hospitals in this country suffered from the complications of infectious diseases. We largely cure those now so you don’t see them these days. We have some new infectious diseases. But we’ve pretty much cured the old ones that causes psychiatric problems...
