Trends Affecting the Field of Mental Health

To examine current trends in the mental-health theoretical and clinical discipline, it is useful to look at the just-preceding period to see how present views have been arrived at. Indeed, there is evidence that competing theories have characterized mental health disciplines from the beginning. Fromm-Reichmann cites Freud's view that neuroses are sex-centered and that once underlying or repressed trauma is discovered and faced, they can be cured and Adler's rejection of sex orientation in favor of systematic analysis of environment and relationships. She says Freud "was the first to understand and describe the psychotherapeutic process in terms of an interpersonal experience between patient and psychiatrist," (1950, p. 3), but elsewhere says "there are no physical symptoms without emotional concomitants and no mental disorders without somatic concomitants or causes."

By the 1980s, the tendency to understand interaction between and among mind, body, and environment had so increased that a majority of clinical psychologi

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ychiatric diagnosis followed by referral to non-M.D. psychotherapy), neuropsychiatry has become a dominant subspecialty because it appears to have resolved some questions relating to traditional mind-body debates over the source of psychological dysfunction. However, there are competing views. One view is that technological advance has not positioned psychiatry as a series of subspecialties but instead has positioned so-called consultation-liaison (CL) or team-treatment strategy as either one among many subspecialties or as the hyperspecialty or supraspecialty, with a variety of psychiatric subspecialties functioning under the supraspecialist CL umbrella. Another strand is that psychiatric subspecialization has simply fragmented the field and in the process marginalized useful psychoanalytic praxis. Yager and Langsley point out the common thread of discourse in these competing views when they note that the explosion of knowledge and skills, aggravated by the information and technology explosion in the wider culture, has overtaken previous conceptions of the scope and limit of mental health disciplines. That is, specialization is essential because the compleat psychiatrist generalist is no longer a realistic
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1254
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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