Abstract
The point has been made in the first chapter that neurosis is not fundamentally organic, and therefore in one sense, not a medical condition. In the second chapter we have described the long argument between the organicists and the psychologists, and again the consensus is that neurosis is not organic. Why then are neurotics seen by doctors? Why do the medical profession, and other health professions (nursing, social work, clinical psychology), concern themselves with the management of neurosis? Professor Eysenck (1975) in his pamphlet The Future of Psychiatry claimed that there was no future in psychiatry for the treatment of the neuroses. He wrote, ‘it seemed desirable and historically justifiable to split psychiatry into two independent parts, one concerned with organic disorders and their treatment, which in turn was largely medical in nature; the other concerned with behavioural disorders and their treatment, which in turn was largely behavioural. It was argued that the former discipline should be the prerogative of medically trained psychiatrists, while the latter should be the prerogative of non-medical psychologists trained in special courses for posts as clinical psychologists’.
‘It should seem that no chronic disease occurs so frequently as this; and that, as fevers with their attendants constitute two thirds of the diseases to which mankind are liable upon comparing them with the whole tribe of chronic distempers, so hysteric disorders, or at least such as are so called, make up half the remaining third part, that is they constitute one moiety of chronic distempers. For few women (which sex makes one half of the grown persons) excepting such as work and fare hardly, are quite free from every species of this disorder, several men also, who lead a sedentary life and study hard, are afflicted with the same.…
This disease is not more remarkable for its frequency, than for the numerous forms under which it appears, resembling most of the distempers wherewith mankind are afflicted.…’
(Thomas Sydenham, 1681)
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© 1983 Andrew Sims
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Sims, A. (1983). An Illness that Needs Treatment. In: Neurosis in Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17113-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17113-2_3
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