Psychiatry in the New Millennium

Abstract

This book is a veritable tour de force! The list of names of the 3 editors and the contributors to this book reads like a who's who in the field of American psychiatry, and their effort is no less impressive than their names. By no stretch of the imagination is this a “standard” psychiatric text. It is not a book that catalogs diagnostic categories and the most current status of their management, nor does it attempt to espouse a particular modality of treatment or approach to clinical issues. Instead, it takes a step back and critically examines the currents that have steered psychiatric practice into the new millennium. Not that there is something magical about the millennium, but it “allows us to examine psychiatry and use a universal date as our marker” (p. xxiii). The last century saw psychiatry change from dogma to a discipline with a basis in molecular biology. The last decade of the last millennium was aptly referred to as the “decade of the brain,” and more is known today about the biological basis of psychiatric illness than at any time in the past. The same decade regrettably saw a continued erosion of the role of interpersonal therapies that had provided the discipline with its identity. It is necessary then, to examine how the practitioners of our profession reached this point.