Integrated models in psychiatry: the state of the art

Excerpt

Social psychiatry has now been a part of psychiatry as a scientific discipline for a century, since Ilberg [1] and Southard [2] first used the term. The remit of social psychiatry is broad, ranging from investigations of social factors in the aetiology of mental disorders, to community psychiatry and health services research, to global and public mental health. However, given psychiatry’s primary orientation to the medical and biological, social psychiatry has held a rather tenuous position, perhaps even more so now, since rapid advances in genetics and neuroscience promise to unearth the basic biological underpinnings of mental disorders. However, intriguingly these advances have demonstrated social psychiatry is central to understanding mental disorders more fully, in all its facets [3]. Indeed, through recent research on genetics and neurobiology, it has become increasingly clear that the social combines with, and impacts on, the biological and the psychological, in a multitude of ways, to increase risk for mental disorders. …