The social orbit of psychiatric patients

Abstract

The trainee psychiatrist usually looks upon patients' relatives as a nuisance. Later, he realizes that an essential part of psychiatric treatment is to mitigate the effects of the patient's illness on his family, and to protect him from injudicious interventions on the part of his friends. Finally, it may occur to him that the patient's illness might be causally linked with recent or past psychological disturbances of close associates. A review of recent researches into the relationship between illnesses of individual patients and psychological disturbances in the people around them (Post and Wardle, 7) revealed that much of the work was inconclusive, largely because the investigators had been prematurely preoccupied with some theoretical issues of interpersonal psychiatry. It was, therefore, decided to approach the subject from a practical, clinical angle.