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Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the branch of medicine concerned with disorders of behaviour and of the emotions, whether or not they are thought to be due to a known disease of the brain.
Psychiatry is concerned with a range of conditions, including schizophrenia, delusional disorders with paranoia (see Paranoid disorders) and mood disorders, especially depression and manic depression.
Psychiatry is used in the treatment of:
- anxiety and phobias,
- psychosomatic (somatoform) disorders,
- dissociative disorders such as personality disorders,
- learning difficulties,
- eating and sleep disorders
- tics, and
- mental disturbance caused by organic brain damage (organic mental syndromes).
Psychiatrists are medically qualified. On the whole, they view their speciality as closely similar to other medical disciplines in the sense that it deals with clearly recognisable diseases, mostly of known cause and with accepted remedies.
Most psychiatrists prefer to think of, and deal with, psychiatric patients as being mentally ill, and of psychiatric disorders as being diseases. This is most easily done in the case of the organic mental syndromes and disorders. Here, either there is a known neurological cause, or the pattern of symptoms and signs strongly suggests that such a cause is operating. Some schools of psychiatry emphasise the biological and genetic factors in behavioural disorders, while others concentrate on psychological or social factors.
Increasingly, a link is being drawn between demonstrable brain changes and the resulting effects on the mind. It is the function of the growing speciality of neuropsychiatry to investigate the psychiatric effects of disorders that have a neurological function or structure.
