P0322 - Truth in psychiatry: Need for a pluralogue

Abstract

Background and Aims:

In order to assist in ameliorating suffering and improving health, psychiatrists engage with patient's experiences and behaviors and the social milieu within which these experiences and behaviors emerge and are expressed. How can psychiatric illnesses (complex biopsychosocial entities) be classified, comprehended, and treated?

Method:

Pluralogue.

Results:

Methodological pluralism must become standard practice in a psychiatry that aspires to stature as a scientific and humanistic discipline. The boundaries of such pluralism are constrained in ways that were first elaborated by Karl Jaspers and can be re-elaborated today. Jaspers already clarified that the methods of psychiatry are perspectival. Emerging from a particular vantage, each method reveals its evidence and at the same time conceals other evidence. Methods clash, complement, are mutually affirmative or disjunctive. Furthermore, the numerous methods of psychiatry are expressed within time - within a temporal horizon - leading us to ask if any is a priori divorced from its history. Can we claim that what is compelling today will not be illusory tomorrow? A scientific and humanistic psychiatry always deals with this challenge.

Conclusions:

Psychiatry is a pragmatic, multiperspectival discipline. The methods of psychiatry are pluralistic. Each needs be clarified, with strengths and limits investigated in isolation and also through a sympathetic yet critical pluralogue. Jaspers mature existential philosophy, his notion of communication as a "loving struggle", and his clarification of truth all developed out his earlier experiences as a clinical psychiatrist. The psychiatrist who practices in 2008 deals with the same multifaceted psychiatric reality.