Operational Psychiatry: An Orientation and Some Aspects

The purpose of this paper is to deal with some of the problems of social psychiatry. This is, of course, a broad field and I think most would agree that it encompasses almost everything pertaining to human behavior that does not go on inside a test tube or is not recorded from a series of amplifiers and vacuum tubes. Social is a word concerned with human beings as a group and as almost no person lives by himself the socialness of any individual's situation cannot be ignored. This then means that social psychiatry ranges from the epidemiological studies of Redlich and Hollingshead to the clinical observation of Tapia that very frequently after committing an anti-social act adolescents will go to the nearest drive-in, there to gorge themselves on the food of simple living—hamburgers, onions and chocolate milk shakes (1, 2). It ranges from Maxwell Jones' therapeutic community to the use of the principles of animal research for setting up on a ward the ways of handling and treating people who exhibit certain types of illnesses (3). It seems to me that a person who says he is interested in social psychiatry must be as interested in the facets of individual psychotherapy as he might be in a finding just made at Washington University in St. Louis, namely, that 40% more neurotic than normal women claim they experience orgasm in their sleep or dreams, or as he might be in various aspects of suicide, which subject Dr. Robins and Dr. O'Neal discuss in this issue of Human Organization (4).