The psychiatrists
- Reference-type:
Journal Article
- Record-number:
17120
- Author:
Tarsh, Michael
- Year:
1971
- Title:
The Psychiatrists
- Journal:
Mind and Mental Health Magazine
- Volume:
1971
- Issue:
Winter
- Pages:
21-21
- Date:
Winter
- Short-title:
The Psychiatrists
- Alternate Journal:
Mind Ment Health Mag
- ISSN:
0300-8266
- Accession-number:
PMC4997102
- Notes:
PMC4997102[pmcid]
- Name-of-database:
PMC
- Language:
eng
Although written by a professor of politics, this book is about American psychiatrists and analysts. It describes two different ‘tribes’ of doctors: analysts, more highly selected, earning more money and seeing fewer patients, who are individually more important and more influential, and general practitioners, working in mental hospitals and centres and seemingly regarded as an inferior breed. Politically both Groups incline to the Left, but the analysts incline much further.
The most interesting parts of the book are the long verbatim extracts in which doctors discuss the difficulties of their work. There appears be a sense of guilt and disillusionment amongst the analysts, who seem to be generally under attack from those favouring physical treatments and behaviour therapy in the one hand and from egalitarian demands for a fairer distribution of psychiatric skills on the other.
The last chapter of the book discusses the future of American Psychiatry which appears to be working towards a system similar to that found in England; analysts
“scorning teachers and trainers and a larger number of general psychiatrists coming into the community. The rivalries between mental hospital and general hospital (mental health centre), already apparent in England, seem about to in the U.S.A. Fringe psychiatric methods-especially sensitivity training at the Esalen Institute”
are discussed in disproportionate detail.
As a whole the book is a revealing portrait of a very unsettled introverted profession, increasingly valued externally, but at the same time, increasingly divergent about the directions in which it wants to proceed.
Michael Tarsh
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