Psychiatry as a medical discipline has been variously described. Even among medical community psychiatry was looked down upon as medical speciality. After World War II when psychiatry's importance was realized for total treatment, its image was supposed to have improved. In the light of these ups and downs a survey of medical community consisting of 5000 doctors was conducted results of which r...

This article provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary psychiatric rehabilitation and community psychiatry tendencies in Poland. On the basis of articles published in the years 1990-2007 in renowned Polish-language journals (Polish Psychiatry, Advances in Psychiatry and Neurology), an attempt was made to establish mainly directions in polish community psychiatry. Authors review the pres...

As the oldest, largest, and best known program for training psychiatrists to become public-sector leaders, the Columbia University Public Psychiatry Fellowship (PPF) at New York State Psychiatric Institute has frequently been consulted by other departments of psychiatry planning public and community fellowship programs. PPF's faculty has developed seven core elements for such training programs....

In forensic psychiatry, one is often called on to examine an accused to determine if he has a mental disorder, thus opening a defense to criminal charges. To this end, the psychiatrist must consider, in the final analysis, whether the accused could meet the test for the insanity defense, taking into account the definitions of legal insanity extant in the jurisdiction. In some jurisdictions, mit...

Erving Goffman's Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates is a key text in the sociology of mental illness. It is sometimes seen simplistically as a paradigm of'antipsychiatry', and as a key step in the triumph of community psychiatry over narrower, medical models of mental illness. Reading Asylums today, however, reveals that this portrayal does not capture ...

In October 1951, we were again approached by the University of Glasgow Extra-mural Education Committee to organise another course of Mental Health lectures. Although it was felt that this would not be very successful, we were persuaded to organise one on a less ambitious scale with a syllabus designed to meet the needs of a small body of advanced students. As in the previous Course the writer a...

1Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, London, UK; 2Department of Palliative Care & Psychooncology, Tata Medical Centre, Kolkata, India; 3South West, Yorkshire NHS Foundation, Trust, Wakefield, UK; 4Central & North West Community Mental Health Team, Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust, Leeds, UK; 5Forensic Psychiatry, Institute of Mental Health, Nott...

This article focuses on the similarities and relations between the European therapeutic community for children and adults on the one hand and the American drug-free "concept" therapeutic community on the other. Both approaches are reviewed in a historical and comparative perspective with special attention to several critical issues: democracy versus hierarchy, self-help versus professionalism, ...