Abstract
This chapter describes the current emphasis on symptoms and descriptive psychiatry as the “new psychiatry” in countries like the United States and others. This movement tends to reduce the understanding of individuals and families to a collection of symptoms. This reductionistic trend influences also decisions about treatment and other therapeutic interventions, with increasing emphasis on psychopharmacology as the “main tool” in this approach to child psychiatry, despite the limited evidence as to its effectiveness. The chapter describes the mind–body concept of a number of conditions that manifest psychic suffering in the form of bodily symptoms. Emphasis is made on the detailed descriptions and formulations of the French school of psychsomatics, (l’ordre psychosomatique) as well as the German view of “psychosomatik,” which incorporate a psychodynamic understanding of the individual in the context of family interactions. The chapter describes the concept of “concretized metaphors” proposed by Skarderud in his writings on anorexia nervosa. All of this has strong implications for the conceptualization of psychosomatic conditions and the nature of the interactions between body and mind in the broadest sense.
It is easy to write prescriptions. What is difficult is to understand people’s lives.(Franz Kafka. A country doctor)
Embrace complexity
(Sally Provence M.D.)
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Morales-Monsalve, M., Maldonado-Duran, J.M., Chandra, P. (2023). Mindless Child Psychiatry and Psychosomatics. In: Maldonado-Duran, J.M., Jimenez-Gomez, A., Saxena, K. (eds) Handbook of Mind/Body Integration in Child and Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18377-5_5
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