preview

Community Psychiatry Paper

Decent Essays

I was recently meeting with some fourth-year residents as part of their course on psychiatry.
Since this was an introductory session, we were focusing on the role of the community psychiatry. Even as trainees, these folks could see how the scope of what they were being asked to do was shaped by financial imperatives and was often limited to biologic perspectives on illness management, and they clearly felt discouraged by the limitations imposed on other methods, and wondered whether there was any way around this. Their perceptions and experiences were closely aligned with the discussions generated at our winter meeting in March. (The draft report from that meeting can be viewed on our website, or specifically here.) And it was not surprising …show more content…

How does one try to convey the essence of community psychiatry in a concise manner? In response to one of the resident’s questions, I began to think about what makes community psychiatry community psychiatry.
He talked about his clinical rotation, in which he saw public-sector clients in a community mental health center. He was scheduled to see patients every 15 – 20 minutes, and he focused on their medications. He wondered whether this was community psychiatry, but it was not. We talked about the fact that it was not just the population, the location, or the duration of contact that defined community psychiatry. “So what is it then?” he …show more content…

Respect for the beliefs and aspirations of others, tolerance for and appreciation of differences, promotion of autonomy and affiliation: these all flow from ethical underpinnings establishing the value of individuals and their social environments.

The second word that stayed in my mind was empathy. What sets community psychiatry apart is a different vision of the culture of the therapeutic interaction. So much of what we are exposed to in training and in thinking of the “doctor-patient” relationship are those things that separate us. We are led to believe that they are sick and we are well. In reality, this dichotomy is artificial, and we have much more in common than we have separating us. We all struggle with our fears, the uncertainty of what lies ahead and our ability to meet the challenges that will confront us. Understanding our similarity and shared experience is the basis for respect and empathy, and enables us to join with our clients as partners in a common struggle.
Coming to this realization may be a long and difficult process, but arriving there is what makes the
“relationship” a healing tool more powerful than most of the medications that we

Get Access