The Search for a New Psychiatry

The book is about Neuroscience as acquired and practiced by myself across 3 continents: from Cairo, issues like colonial psychiatry, pellagra madness, population explosion and contraception are highlighted. In Moscow the beginning of my long interest in the concept of stress and its relevance to health and illness as also reflections on science and religion in an atheist society are detailed. In Rome expanding the concept of stress to cardiovascular reactivity consolidated my interest. In Toronto my neuroscience background and psychiatry came together for the next 50 years and where my academic interests focused on schizophrenia, quality of care issues and outcomes related to the person behind the illness. The book concludes in a major analysis of how modern psychiatric practices has failed many: patients, their doctors, their families and the society at large. The imperative for the search for new psychiatry is presented as my deep wish to save psychiatry as a credible medical specialty.