Psychiatry occupies a very specific position within the field of medicine, given that it integrates the biological, psychological, and sociological dimensions that all contribute to the expression of mental health disorders. The essential innovations that have taken place within the fields of biology and more particularly, neuroscience, experimental psychology, and social sciences, may all be instrumental in advancing the field of psychiatry. On the other hand, psychiatry appears to be quite preoccupied with the mental health treatment reform that will profoundly modify treatment attitudes, involving an increase in community mental healthcare services, as well as more efficient first-line care facilities for mental health problems. On account of this treatment reform, special attention will be given to limiting desocialization of patients, developing mobile care units that are able to visit isolated patients at home, while promoting care intensification within hospital care units, in addition to creating long-term housing facilities for the most fragile patients. The Department of Adult Psychiatry of the academic Saint-Luc Hospital is heavily involved in this reform, but also in the project of building a new psychiatric hospital in Woluwé, in direct collaboration with the Sanatia Hospital and with our colleagues from the infanto-juvenile psychiatry department. One major challenge inherent to this new project is to not abandon our role and place in the main academic hospital, where specific innovative initiatives are presently being implemented, and this in close collaboration with our colleagues from the somatic medical fields. To end with, we think it essential that all these changes do not make us forget psychiatry’s anthropological roots that must remain its major strengths.
Key words
Psychiatry, neurosciences, mental health treatment reform, experimental psychology, sociology, anthropology