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Physical and mental illnesses: implications of similarities and differences for services and law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sean Roche
Sean Roche*
Affiliation:
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust King's College London, email seanedroche@hotmail.com
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It appears self-evident that psychiatry should be classified as a particular specialty within the broader field of medicine. Psychiatrists, being first and foremost doctors, have undertaken an identical basic training to their physician and surgical peers and, as in general medicine and surgery, the biomedical model is a central pillar of psychiatric practice. Within psychiatry, signs and symptoms are elicited, diagnoses made and very often physical interventions (in the form of psychotropic agents) are employed. However, familiar institutional conventions can conceal the fact that psychiatry suffers from greater uncertainty regarding its conceptual foundations than other fields of medicine. In fact, the conceptual challenges arising within psychiatry are reflected in its thriving field of philosophy, and although there exists a dedicated philosophy of medicine, no other specialty is equal to psychiatry's breadth of conceptual debate.

Type
Guest Editorial
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 28 - 30
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2013

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