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Psychiatry. A word that even today,
for many people conjures up a sense of mystery and threat. A word
that only yesterday brought to mind sinister pictures of mental homes,
“snake pits” of incredible violence, both suffered and perpetrated
by the mentally ill, of cruel electric-shock punishments, of marginalisation
and “civil death”. A word that only fifty years ago, conjured up pictures,
including among medics, of a marginal field where failure was rife,
of imprecise or even impossible diagnoses, of an esoteric and hard-to-understand
language, but above all of therapeutic failure. The doctors who chose
this field were often thought of as unsuccessful in their profession
or eccentric individuals not worthy of being considered among the
practicians of “real medicine” or triumphant surgery. Only half a
century has passed since then and yet those times seem so far away.
Half a century that is a flash in the long history of medicine but
which has transformed psychiatry into the most advanced and proud
of medical fields.
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