KS

Psychiatry, as a branch of medicine concerned with the treatment of mental illness, should be viewed as same as those of common diseases such as fever and cold.

The truthfulness of psychiatry could be called into question considering the fact that no significant improvements can be seen on a person with mental health problems after receiving treatments first few times. However, different from other types of diseases that patients can recover soon after taking medicine, their symptoms can only be reduced gradually given the complex nature of mental health issues. To illustrate it, diagnosing the specific type of disorders a person has takes a long period of time since many mental issues share similar symptoms. For example, sometimes schizophrenia is firstly identified as depression because they have similar symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. In addition, the aim of psychiatry is not to completely eliminate one’s mental health issue since most mental disorders are incurable, but to improve the quality of life. Due to the plasticity of human brain, people with some degree of mental illness can live a positive life receiving treatment and maintain a good interpersonal relationship.

If misunderstanding psychiatry undermines the contribution of psychiatrists, then denying its value could harm the group of people with mental health problems. The refusal to receive treatments from professional doctors may aggravate their mental health issues and increase the difficulty for them to be fully recovered. What is more, it should be noticed that the stigmatization in society to psychiatry negatively affects the evaluation of people’s real mental capacity. People with distrust of their psychiatrists may unconsciously act according to biased ideas in society and lower the efficiency of mental health treatments, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, their mental conditions may confuse psychiatrists to find the real cause of their problems.

Though psychiatry should be seen indiscriminately as other medical treatments, considering the complexity of mental health issues, psychiatrists need to conduct more comprehensive tasks such as diagnosing the correct mental disorders and applying treatments including evaluating cognitive ability and offering appropriate medicine to people with mental health issues. Thus, psychiatry is not a sham but a more complicated field of medicine comparing with fever and cold which benefits people with mental health problems significantly.