Evaluating Psychiatric Treatment

Abstract
PSYCHIATRISTS, like everyone else, win some and lose some.1(pp722-756)The inability of a psychiatrist to cure or to alleviate a patient's illness may reflect the psychiatrist's limitations with a refractory illness, or it may reflect some difficulty the patient is having in perceiving the benefit of therapy. Occasionally, failure is due to the psychiatrist's lack of skill or to the interference of the psychiatrist's own problems in the therapy.2More often, failure is due to obstacles inherent in the nature of psychotherapy as a treatment technique. In many of these instances, one psychiatrist may succeed where a colleague has failed, since a patient who gives a detailed description of his disappointment with his former psychiatrist provides his new physician with valuable information. The patient or his family, angered or disappointed by failure, may ask our opinion about the psychotherapy. We should be able to distinguish proper psychiatric treatment

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