Welcome to the first podcast entitled Psychiatry And Its Subject. Today’s podcast outlines what makes psychiatry a distinctive medical discipline with a special image, primarily because it deals with something we cannot see – the mind. Its history too is distinctive and a combination of history and psychiatry allows us to delve deeply into all aspects of human life: mind and body, emotions and experiences, thoughts and moods, the self and others, lay and expert opinion, health and illness, science and society, normal and abnormal, liberty and compulsion. The podcast also offers some basic modern and historic definitions of mental disorders: conditions that for centuries were known generically as ‘madness’.
Image: Cover page of William Battie’s Treatise on Madness. Courtesy of Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/