Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Office of Communications and Public Affairs
July 17, 2000
MEMORANDUM
TO: Editors and Reporters
FROM: Marjorie Centofanti
410-955-8725
[email protected]
SUBJECT: Psychiatry As A Pendulum: Why It Shouldn't Swing Back.
Hopkins Psychiatry Chief Paul McHugh Offers A Survivor's Perspective
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In the cover article of the July 17 issue of The Weekly Standard, head of Johns Hopkins psychiatry Paul McHugh comments on his specialty's checkered course, from the "dark" days when Freud stood on a pedestal, to the present, which McHugh likens to "Russia after the fall of communism."
McHugh wrote "The Death of Freud and the Rebirth of Psychiatry," as a critique of a recently issued book, "Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder of American Psychiatry," by anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann. That author, McHugh says, pines for a return to Freudian psychoanalysis because widespread pill-dispensing has "plucked the soul" from modern psychiatry.
But McHugh balks at returning to those days when he and fellow medical students were taught that mental disorders stemmed from over-forceful toilet training or the childhood shock of discovering sexual differences. He speaks of that time when "young psychiatrists were told to think of themselves as "little messes" caring for "bigger messes," a time when "a corrupting self-absorption pervaded psychiatric departments" like someone shaking off a bad dream.
What's to come? Even in the face of managed care and shrinking psychiatric benefits, McHugh is optimistic. Perhaps because of such constraints, he says, psychiatrists, like other doctors, will emerge "committed to healing, rather than indoctrinating, their patients."
To interview McHugh, contact Marjorie Centofanti at 410-955-8725 or [email protected]
--JHMI--
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