The Perspectives of Psychiatry

Revised to include new material, the aim of this text remains providing a concise, coherent introduction to a fragmented discipline. The authors emphasize psychiatry's unifying concepts while accommodating its diversity, distilling practice into four central themes: disease; dimensions of personality; goal-directed behaviours; and life stories. These perspectives, the authors argue, underlie the principles and practice of all psychiatry. With an understanding of these fundamental viewpoints, readers should be better equipped to organize and evaluate the spectrum of psychiatric knowledge and methods.