Psychiatry in Trouble: Narrative from a Damaged Profession. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Psychiatry in Trouble: Narrative from a Damaged Profession

Chance can change a life, and it certainly changed mine. As a third-year undergraduate at Harvard, I overheard a conversation about a college volunteer program in the local state mental hospital, and for the next two years I volunteered on the back wards of the hospital. Each week, I would talk with Mary, a gray-haired, tired woman who had been sitting quietly in a corner for three years. Over the academic year that we talked, she regained enough function to leave the hospital, and I believe our conversations were part of what made that happen. My experience with Mary would prove to change the course of my life.

After graduating from college, I went on to graduate study in academic psychology, but I changed direction as I realized how much I missed the experience with Mary and other patients. I went on to medical school and from there to psychiatry. Now, more than fifty years later, I have two stories to tell: my own, and how psychiatry changed during my working lifetime.

I spent my career as an academic psychiatrist working in a public hospital, where I taught young physicians and other trainees to take care of sick, poor people while also caring for patients myself. I loved my work; but at the same time, I saw how psychiatry was changing, and I was troubled by what I saw. When I trained in the 1960s, psychiatrists cared for patients as individuals. Now, they push pills and promise more than they can deliver. In this book, I describe that change and I offer a proposal for a different and better psychiatry-one that returns psychiatry to its roots and is more helpful to patients and more fulfilling for psychiatrists.

James C. Beck, MD, PhD is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has worked primarily in the CambridDD City Hospital Psychiatry Department where he teaches trainees in psychiatry and other mental health professions how to take care of very sick, often very poor, patients. He also has a private practice at the interface of psychiatry and law.