Surviving in Psychiatry as a Systemic Therapist

Abstract

Although family therapy was born to deal with problems posed by severe mental disorders, systemic therapists today tend to drift away from the field of psychiatry. The author refers to his own experience in psychiatry to argue in favour of the presence of the systemic model within the field: systemic understanding might be precious to counterbalance the tendency toward too easy a reliance on bio-psychiatry and pharmacology. In turn, keeping close to psychiatry and to its problems can be useful to systemic therapists, by involving them in social and epistemological queries that are otherwise extraneous to professionals mainly devoted to private practice.