History and the psychiatrist

Historical consciousness is a valuable tool in psychiatry. History can be useful to psychiatrists by expanding their awareness and revealing general errors in the content of psychiatric knowledge, detecting drastic distortions that appear in the ways knowledge is applied to patients, helping to avoid mistakes in public policies that involve psychiatry and result from erroneous impressions of social history, and alerting us to possible future trends. Although history does not give answers--rather , a complex context within which to seek them--it still has value for the psychiatrist.