[Psychiatrists, lawyers and shamans in the care of the mentally ill].

Ethical attitudes of our society to the mentally sick still lag behind the economic development and legal norms. There prevail fixed prejudices also against psychiatry, as revealed by a recent fraudulent newspaper campaign on the political abuse of psychiatry, supported by a few of our colleagues. Our amended legal regulations which ensure civic rights of patients are stricter than in western countries but rely more on slow legal control than on medical ethics. The retardation of our psychiatry diminished gradually since the ministerial and government resolution on its development was issued in 1958 and 1962 and after the introduction of psychopharmacological treatment and preparations psychotherapy was not neglected either. A further advance of our psychiatry should be made possible by objective evaluation and the use of procedures applied successfully in other countries and not imitation of serious mistakes such as the commercial abuse of health legislation, rash abolition of psychiatric hospitals, pseudoliberal attitudes to the drug misuse and the spread of therapeutic dilettantism.