Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:36:50.757Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social sciences and medical humanities: the new focus of psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Dinesh Bhugra  and
Antonio Ventriglio
Dinesh Bhugra
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK, email dinesh.bhugra@kcl.ac.uk
Antonio Ventriglio
Affiliation:
Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Foggia, Foggia, Italy, email a.ventriglio@libero.it
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The clinical practice of psychiatry should incorporate a biopsychosocial model of illness, acknowledging both cultural and social influences on the patient's experience. Medical humanities include a number of academic disciplines that complement the clinical practice of psychiatry. The medical profession, including psychiatry, has a social responsibility to study the psychosocial context within which people become ill and have to be treated. Although the biopsychosocial model of illness has strong theoretical foundations, its application in clinical practice is limited. A new approach would be to restructure medical student teaching to include medical humanities in the first year, and to share such education with other professions.

Type
Guest Editorial
Information
BJPsych International , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 79 - 80
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2015

References

Anderson, M. R., Smith, L. & Sidel, V. W. (2005) What is social medicine? Monthly Review, at http://monthlyreview.org/2005/01/01 (accessed 25 July 2013).Google Scholar
Bhugra, D. (2014) All medicine is social. (Number 2 in the series ‘Sense and sensibility: society, medicine and its practitioners'.) Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 107, 183–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, L. (1977a) Disease and illness: distinctions between professional and popular ideas of sickness. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1, 9–23.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, L. (1977b) Psychiatry and society. New England Journal of Medicine, 296, 903–910.Google Scholar
Eisenberg, L. (1980) What makes persons ‘patients' and patients ‘well’? American Journal of Medicine, 89, 277–288.Google Scholar
Engel, G. L. (1980) The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137, 535–544.Google Scholar
Fathalla, M. F. (2000) When medicine rediscovered its social roots. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 78, 677–678.Google Scholar
Fenton, S. & Charsley, K. (2000) Epidemiology and sociology as incommensurate games: accounts from the study of health and ethnicity. Health, 4, 403–425.Google Scholar
Greaves, D. & Evans, M. (2000) Medical humanities. Medical Humanities, 26, 1–2.Google Scholar
Hankir, A. & Zaman, R. (2013) Jung's archetype, ‘The Wounded Healer’, mental illness in the medical profession and the role of the health humanities in psychiatry. BMJ Case Reports, doi 10.0136/docr_2013-009990.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A., Eisenberg, L. & Good, B. (1978) Clinical lessons from anthropologic and cross-cultural research. Annals of Internal Medicine, 88, 251–258.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosen, G. (1974) From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care. Science History Publications.Google Scholar
Rutherford, B. R. & Hellerstein, D. J. (2008) Divergent fates of the medical humanities in psychiatry and internal medicine: should psychiatry be rehumanized? Academic Psychiatry, 32, 206–213.Google Scholar
Storington, S. & Holmes, S. M. (2006) Social medicine in the twenty-first century. PLOS Medicine, 3, e445–e446.Google Scholar
Zola, J. K. (1972) Studying the decision to see a doctor. In Advances in Psychosomatic Medicine (ed. Lipowski, Z.), pp. 216–236. Karger.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.