Introduction to Psychiatry

What’s going through your mind? How do billions of cells orchestrate life, generate the experience of the soul, and create who we are as a person? What then are mental disorders, and how do we treat them? These are questions psychiatrists ponder. Modern science has led to marvelous breakthroughs in medicine for diseases that can be physically described and modeled, but diseases of the mind remain perplexing. The mind is the final frontier, and much remains to be understood and discovered. For those that are afflicted by mental illness, discoveries cannot come fast enough, and as psychiatrists, it is our privilege to work at the intersection of medicine, neuroscience, culture, and technology to help alleviate patient suffering and incorporate new knowledge as it becomes available. We set out to treat mental illness and understand the inner workings of the mind: Things that are in some ways still mysterious but are clearly highly complex. Those who enter psychiatry understand the lifelong learning involved and feel comfortable operating within a gray space. Patients must be considered from multiple viewpoints to construct an accurate formulation and help treat their mental illness. If the state of the specialty is still appealing after hearing all the above, then know that Psychiatry is one of the up-and-coming fields of medicine (Fig. 1.1).