The scientific status of psychiatry within medicine

Psychiatry is in ferment. In the present sluggish economy nonphysician psychotherapists, often charging lower fees, are competing with psychiatrists for patients. At the same time theories and therapies that can be characterized as psychodynamic appear to be on the defensive, increasingly challenged by those with behavioral or psychopharmacologic foundations. A growing emphasis on statistical rigor in research increases this phenomenon. One general response to all of this by the psychiatric profession has been a reassertion of psychiatry's connections and identification with medicine and with science. The author contends that although this response is understandable and may provide some support for the prestige of psychiatry, the issue at hand is fundamentally an epistemologic one. It is a deeply rooted and structural dilemma.