Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:14:49.335Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The social orbit of psychiatric patients

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

Felix Post*
Affiliation:
The Maudsley Hospital, London, S.E.5

Extract

The trainee psychiatrist usually looks upon patients' relatives as a nuisance. Later, he realizes that an essential part of psychiatric treatment is to mitigate the effects of the patient's illness on his family, and to protect him from injudicious interventions on the part of his friends. Finally, it may occur to him that the patient's illness might be causally linked with recent or past psychological disturbances of close associates. A review of recent researches into the relationship between illnesses of individual patients and psychological disturbances in the people around them (Post and Wardle, 7) revealed that much of the work was inconclusive, largely because the investigators had been prematurely preoccupied with some theoretical issues of interpersonal psychiatry. It was, therefore, decided to approach the subject from a practical, clinical angle.

Type
Social Psychiatry
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1962 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cowie, Valerie (1961). “The incidence of neurosis in the children of psychotics”, Acta. Psychiat. Scand., 37, 37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Culpan, R. H., Davies, B. M., and Oppenheim, A. N. (1960). “Incidence of psychiatric illness among hospital out-patients”, Brit. Med. J., i, 855.Google Scholar
3 Heron, A. (1956). “A two-part personality measure for use as a research criterion”, Brit. J. Psychol., 47, 243.Google Scholar
4 Leighton, Dorothea C. (1956). “The distribution of psychiatric symptoms in a small town”, Am. J. Psychiat., 112, 716.Google Scholar
5 Lin, T. Y. (1953). “A study of the incidence of mental disorder in Chinese and other cultures”, Psychiatry, 16, 313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Pasamanick, B., Roberts, D. W., Lemkau, P. W., and Krueger, D. B. (1959). “A survey of mental disease in an urban population” in “Epidemiology of Mental Disorders”, Publication No. 60 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Washington, D.C. Google Scholar
7 Post, F., and Wardle, Joan (1962). “Family neurosis and family psychosis: a review of the literature”, J. Ment. Sci., 108, 147.Google Scholar
8 Willmott, P., and Young, M. (1960). Family and Class in a London Suburb. London: Routledge ' Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.