The future educational needs of psychiatrists

The author states the psychiatry must work at defining its boundaries as a discipline before the question of how to educate future practitioners can be answered. The medical student is presented with a bewildering array of approaches to psychiatric treatment and is pressured to choose quickly. The author calls for collaboration among the various parts of psychiatry--social psychiatry, community psychiatry, research, biochemistry, etc.--with other university faculties such as the humanities and basic sciences. The goal of this collaboration would be to produce a mature professional capable of dealing with the whole person. He also calls for a greater emphasis on research to equip psychiatry with the necessary knowledge to establish its role in our ever-changing contemporary society.