Psychiatrist, Heal Thyself

Is psychiatry all that it is cracked up to be? Emphatically not, says Montreal Psychiatrist Elliott Emanuel. "In our generation," he writes in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, "some of the biggest names in psychiatry are men whose scientific contributions have been negligible, whose contact with individual patients has been minimal for several years, and whose time is devoted to committees, journalism, and publicity for themselves and their institutions . . . Within the various schools of psychiatry we have much mutual backslapping and back-scratching in spite of intense personal rivalry, while a bland and successful fac,ade is presented to the outside world . . .

"The analytic movement has spawned a dozen heresies, and illustrates the process whereby the least certainty generates the greatest dogmatism . . . Grandiose fantasies of reforming the world are common." Dr. Emanuel tartly quotes an eminent fellow Canadian, Psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, former (1948-53) head of U.N.'s World Health Organization: "In psychiatry . . . lies the best hope of resolving international tensions and so preventing war. The greatest need is that everybody should reach emotional maturity free from neurotic drives." Congresses of psychiatrists themselves. Dr. Emanuel comments, "are not remarkably free from tensions, nor are the families of psychiatrists notable for their mental health."

Dr. Emanuel's prescription for his fellow practitioners: "As supposedly mature men, able to accept the world as it is, though glad to play our part in changing it, we should not employ childish mechanisms of denial or omnipotence of thought."

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