[Psychiatric treatment--methods and ethics].

Abstract

The success rate of psychiatric treatment is satisfactory for selected disease categories, but is hardly so when all psychiatric ailments are considered together. This is amongst other things reflected in psychiatric patients' high frequency of readmission, their increased mortality, their large and frequently long-term use of medications and in their social conditions. A low success rate is a problem not only for the individual patient who does not receive sufficient help, but also for psychiatry as a whole. Psychiatry's reputation depends largely on treatment success, and this reputation is vital for the confidence of patients when seeking treatment and of society when allocating resources. Treatment success may be improved by a methodical development of treatment technology, in psychiatric terms first and foremost a coordination of medical therapy, psychotherapy and social treatment. A technological advance is however not sufficient in itself. Treatment success also depends on a suitable demarcation of those problems that psychiatry takes it upon itself to solve. The professional debate has been particularly lacking in this area, and often out of touch with the debate in the rest of society. If people with thought or emotional disturbances or abnormal behaviour are to be satisfactorily helped, it is necessary that society's different groups giving professional treatment enter a dynamic development that constantly adjusts the balance between the groups to be helped and the helpers of different educational background that are available.