Science & Technology
Psychiatry
Neel Burton approaches the complex ethical and philosophical issues that are inherent to the practice of psychiatry. Psychiatry is a comprehensive textbook that draws upon material in the arts and humanities to provide a fresh and innovative cultural approach designed for medical students and health care professionals.
Fresh, in writing a book that is clear and concise while comprehensive and detailed, Neel Burton emphasizes important areas of a science that address the very essence of what it is to be human. Innovative, by making psychiatry come alive through detailed case studies and the use of numerous examples from the worlds of art, film and literature to emphasize the biopsychosocial model that is especially pertinent to this branch of medicine.
Professor John Cox, Secretary General of the World Psychiatric Association in Geneva, writes in the foreword to Psychiatry that the values-based practice emphasized in this book should in future form an important part of medical undergraduate training, where doctors require an "understanding of their own psychological, cultural, and spiritual assumptions in order to practice in a multicultural society."
For Neel Burton, the field of psychiatry comes alive in facing up to the "empirical and conceptual challenges that hinder its progress and leave it exposed to criticism". Psychiatry considers the historical context of the long-standing differences between the humoral and spiritual approaches to mental illness, a debate originally emanating from the ancient Greek words psyche and iatreia, or "healing of the soul," It is indeed this spiritual, and often religious, dimension to the field that makes it different from other medical specialties.
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