Psychiatry v. Antipsychiatry

As a medical discipline, psychiatry has often been the target of severe criticism, particularly in the last fifty to sixty years. Is the criticism valid or not? What is the outlook for the science of mental illness and the practice of psychiatry? Our guest today defends his chosen medical specialty.

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA, is a Staff Psychiatrist at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and an Adjunct Professor at the Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School of Addiction Studies. His clinical interests have been in acute care, geriatric psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, and addiction psychiatry. He currently practices addiction psychiatry, providing psychiatric consultation on patient care to the professional staff, and lectures on the neurobiology, epidemiology, and the clinical aspects of addiction psychiatry.

Dr. Dawson completed his training in psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin where he was a research fellow. Scholarly interests include biological psychiatry, consciousness studies, and the medical, philosophical, and political aspects of psychiatry. In his spare time, he writes a blog (RealPsychiatry) about some of these topics