"PSYCHIATRY IN CRISIS.."

This book is written for both students and experienced professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, nurses, nurses' aides, secretaries, city officials, interested laymen and family members, who, by profession or out of compassion, must deal with the wide spectrum of people who are dependent upon the city's social work agencies, drug rehabilitation centers or mental hospitals for financial, psychological and moral support. It is a work written in the spirit of new beginnings. What are the full implications of process work with extreme states? At the present time, near the end of the 1980s, the most common paradigm in psychiatry is the so-called 'medical model.' This model has various aspects to it. At its core lies the concept of causality and the related programs of defining disease, searching for its causes and attempting to cure it with behavioral and chemical interventions. This program organizes definitions, research and treatments of what are defined mental illnesses. The biomedical paradigm has proven to be useful in the cure and amelioration of symptoms in medicine and psychiatry, though its applicability to the latter is debated by many authors [Greist et al., 1982). The global, and by now common, critiques of modern psychiatry usually deal with the incongruity of its focus. If it deals mainly with mood states, with affects, feelings, hallucinations and disturbed belief systems, then, according to many, it should stand on its own relative to its parent, modern medicine, and not simply adapt medical concepts which only partly apply to non-physical disease descriptions.