[Possibility and limits of the understanding-horizon of psychiatry]

A significant approach in present day psychiatry called evidence-based (EBP) resorts to research as well as practice using standardized methods of evaluation of operating symptoms and description of symptoms. It also assesses certain psychopathological issues using numeric measures, which allows any person to gather and verify data following reproducible methods, at any time and in any place. However, the progressive detachment from the concrete, the situational disconnection and disregard of the subject in its facticity leave open gaps in the scientific nature of psychiatry. Therefore, an alternative approach relies on value-based psychiatry (VBP), also called medicine based on narratives, precisely because the work of the clinician gets closer to that of the historian, the biographical author and the ethnographer.