Can you tell the difference between psychology and psychiatry? Many people are unable to adequately answer this question. If you are one of them, don’t worry. In other articles, we have already talked about the difference between psychology and psychiatry. In this one, we are going to define what psychiatry is.
According to Dr. Juan José López-Ibor, psychiatry is the branch of medicine in which psychic phenomena are important as conditioning factors, manifestations, or therapeutic agents. In addition, the field of psychiatry extends to collaboration with other specialties for the study of certain specific clinical activities, diseases, or symptoms. For example, psychological problems that arise as a result of other diseases with a clear physical correlation.
This is the path of psychological medicine and liaison psychiatry that have succeeded in so-called psychosomatic medicine. The latter aimed to study the psychological causes and treatments of somatic diseases.
Psychosomatic medicine and its evolution
Psychosomatic medicine therefore applies the cause-effect model. This model is very important in the scientific tradition and the training of doctors. However, a new perspective is gradually emerging.
This new, multifactorial, or integrative perspective understands that psychological phenomena are not something added to biological processes. On the contrary, they form a unitary, integrated whole, according to the so-called biopsychosocial model.
According to this biopsychosocial model, psychological, biological, and social aspects are nothing more than different faces of the same phenomenon. According to this new perspective, diseases in general cannot be considered only as the expression of damage induced by external agents (traumatic or infectious, for example).
First of all, they are the expression of adaptation mechanisms to stressful situations. They aim to maintain a balance on which individual survival depends. The cells of the organism need a precisely regulated internal environment (homeostasis), which is always threatened by variations in the external environment.
Similarly, personality develops in its world that needs to remain within certain limits. It must be said that pathology (both somatic and psychic) is more the expression of adaptive mechanisms than of the possible causes that set them in motion.
Doctors do, in fact, resort to treatments to mitigate those responses that, in principle, had, or could have had, importance for the survival of the individual. Examples of these treatments are corticosteroids to inhibit inflammatory phenomena, analgesics to relieve pain, etc.
Psychiatry is a medical specialty.
As a medical specialty, psychiatry deals with disorders caused by malformations, injuries, damage, and diseases of the brain (organic mental disorders) or of other organs that secondarily affect brain functions (symptomatic mental disorders).
Psychiatry also deals with behavior patterns that lead to substance abuse and its consequences (substance abuse disorders, such as alcoholism ). It also deals with schizophrenia and other disorders that may cause delusions, such as affective disorders, neuroses, or adjustment disorders.
Psychiatry can develop important functions in mental health in collaboration with other branches of knowledge and application. These can be educators, psychologists, nurses, social workers, etc. In this sense, lifestyles that involve a health risk are becoming increasingly important for medicine, whether for the prevention of diseases or for the rehabilitation of those who have already fallen ill.
What psychiatry is not
It is important to point out what psychiatry is not. From the beginning of the century until a few decades ago, the influence of psychoanalysis led psychiatry to inflation: psychiatry had an explanation (or claimed to have one) and an answer for every type of human problem.
In recent years, psychiatry has undergone a process of “remedicalization”. It has become an important support for clinical and biological research, characterized by greater rigor in the application of its therapeutic methods. In addition, it has become more aware of its limits and of its possible and most effective fields of action.
It is in this sense that its collaboration with medicine is most clearly outlined. It is to be hoped that it will also be reflected in its support for other sectors of research.
Finally, I would like to answer the question at the beginning in a very simple way. It could be said that the psychologist investigates the psychological and mental characteristics of the patient while the psychiatrist focuses his work on the medical-pharmacological field. Two fields “condemned”, for the good of the patient, to work in harmony.