Theoretical Background of Human Based Psychiatry

Abstract

Every medical intervention is embedded in the prevailing spirit of its particular time. The world of modern medicine that is still shaped by positivism is often revered as a world of rational calculation and reason, a world in which mathematical calculation and so-called objectivity are prized above all else. Indeed, today's modern medicine in general and its battlewagon evidence-based medicine is a world of sober number games, reduction and fragmentation, of demystification and de-subjectification. As important and indispensable the achievements of EbM are, it nevertheless needs to be expanded by a medicine, which focuses not just on illness and its treatment but which places the concrete individual with all his or her sufferings and potentials. Such a human-based medicine (HbM) is no longer indebted to modern positivism, but seeks its foundations in the maxims of post-modernism. Moving away from classical “indication-based medicine” toward a medicine based on human sufferings and potentials necessarily requires a fundamental change in diagnostics and treatment.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.