What is "psychiatry"?

What is "psychiatry"?

Christopher Reist (Academic Psychiatrist, Co-Author of “Psychiatry”) gives expert video advice on: What is "psychiatry"?; What's the difference between "psychiatry" and "psychology"?; What is a "mental disorder"?

Psychiatry is a medical subspecialty that focuses on the assessment and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatry is very focused on helping people with mental disorders achieve recovery and get them back to a full level of functioning. Psychiatry looks at mental illness from the medical standpoint. Just as we look at hypertension or cardiovascular disease, when we look at mental disorders, we're really looking for what the biological underpinnings of this illness are. Psychiatry also borrows very heavily from other fields, especially psychology. Psychology has been very helpful in understanding some of the psychological processes that are part of mental illness. It's also important for psychiatrists to have a good appreciation of culture, history and anthropology because the way we gather our information about a person is through talking to them, so we really need to understand what are those other factors that would be influencing that kind of communication. That's really what makes psychiatry challenging and fun: there are a lot of aspects of the person that we need to pay attention to and really strive to understand.