Psychiatric Disorders/Psychiatric Treatments

Psychiatric Treatments

These may be biological, psychological, and/or social. In fact psychiatry is the area in medicine par excellence where it most makes sense—ideologically and practically—that these three domains be integrated, since psychiatry focuses on examining and remedying disorders which involve the whole person.

Biological: these commonly include medications and electroconvulsive therapy. Many psychiatrists consider that physical aspects of lifestyle such as activity level and diet have an influence on symptomatology, for instance upon the mood disorders. More controversial but receiving increasing recognition are the effects of vitamin and mineral deficiency (for instance zinc deficiency in depression), and glucose intolerance.

Psychological: these talking therapies range from hypnosis, to psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, to cognitive and behavioral (CBT) strategies. Psychoanalytic and CBT techniques are amongst the most researched treatment modalities in all of medicine and find a particular place in the treatment—often long-term—of patients with personality disorders; they also allow amelioration of a wide variety of other conditions. One mediating concept is that of attachment, both in childhood and throughout the lifespan.

Social: Housing, family and social support structures, financial difficulty all play a role in the genesis of psychiatric disorders and certainly affect prognosis. The role of the allied treatment team may be crucial. Stress responses, involving increasingly well-understood biological mechanisms, mediate.

Forensic Psychiatry

Forensic psychiatry is a branch of medicine which focuses on the interface of law and mental health. It includes psychiatric consultation in a wide variety of legal matters (including expert testimony), as well as clinical work with perpetrators and victims. Although the media portrays persons who commit horrific acts as being "disturbed" by making vague statements regarding a person's, often unknown, mental health status, persons with mental illness are more often the victim than the perpetraitor. More than one-fourth of persons with severe mental illness are victims of violent crime in the course of a year, a rate 11 times higher than that of the general population, according to a study by researchers at Northwestern University. They estimated that nearly 3 million severely mentally ill people are crime victims each year in the United States. This is the first such study to include a large, random sample of community-living, mentally ill persons and to use the same measures of victimization used by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, said lead author Linda Teplin, Ph.D., Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University and acting fill-in anchor on WGN News, in the August Archives of General Psychiatry.

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