Psychiatry is essential for now but might eventually disappear (although this is unlikely to happen any time soon)

Abstract

Objective: To provide an overview of specific aspects of historical and possible future trajectories of psychiatry. Conclusions: Psychiatric treatments alleviate suffering, promote physical health, and are associated with increased longevity. As the biological underpinnings of mental illnesses are slowly uncovered, they generally cease to be primarily part of psychiatry (e.g. epilepsy, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis). If this process continues, the biological basis of all symptom-based ‘mental illnesses’ might be described, and psychiatry absorbed into neurology and other disciplines. This will be a positive development if it provides better treatment for mental illness and psychiatric symptoms in other conditions, which is psychiatry’s sole concern. Psychiatry’s own survival as a distinct discipline is irrelevant if other disciplines can do the job better, possibly in collaboration. Given the tiny impact of neuroscience on psychiatry to date, the disappearance of psychiatry is unlikely to occur anytime soon, if ever. It is possible that human psychological functioning and psychiatric suffering are sufficiently complex and changeable as to defy complete, fine-grained, neuroscientific explanation. This would leave a role for psychiatry indefinitely, treating the immensely disabling, biologically unexplained clusters of symptoms that we currently call ‘mental illnesses’, increasingly in collaboration with, or absorbed within, other disciplines in medicine.