Integrated Psychiatry - Introduction
Integrated Psychiatry has been developed after years of experience along more than thirty years of practice. It results from deep pondering over psychiatry and psychotherapy of dynamic psychiatry in the medical context of our area.
Throughout our medical life, we have idealized for São Leopoldo a differentiated environment, in which medical practice would be based on mutual respect, ethics, secrecy, confidence, and on the personalized treatment of our clients, in a constant partnership of committed promotion of physical and mental health.
We should rescue the values that are at the very base of the guiding principles of good medicine. Its underpinnings comprise a respectful relation between doctor and patient, within the triangle medical doctor-family-patient, which aims at the client’s prompt physical and mental reintegration and his/her return to family and social life.
Human beings are unique in their complex dynamics of life. Thus, the working group that constitutes Integrated Medicine will always aim at the client’ s fast reintegration and his/her going back to family and society, like a healthier and happier person. Disease drains off human beings their most precious gift: happiness and dignity. Hence, the noblest role of a doctor is to return to them what is theirs by right.
Medicine has to be and act in all areas of human activity, and must attend to all its health needs aiming at the highest degree of equilibrium and life quality of a human being.
Concept of Integrated Psychiatry
Health is a broad and dense concept, though, it should incorporate, at least, two features: the physical and the emotional. Though they are dissociated and deeply related, the view of an integrated medicine is rather new. Because of a multiplicity of focus that medicine has opened, a superabundance of specialized fields has emerged. However, as they brought recognized advances to the objectivity of their research studies, they have also promoted a narrowing of focus that has led to a loss of perception of the whole, which is vital to medicine. We started seeing our patients, or clients, as isolated pieces , without the necessary integrated perspective, which takes into consideration family and work structures.
Competitivity makes different human beings and it has high impact upon their lives, family structures, and their ways of behaving and thinking. Physical and mental distress are inevitable. Who are these persons? How do they live and think? To what sort of stress are they submitted? Why do they have such an early death rate ? What makes them die? These are examples of the type of questions that medicine as a whole started to ask.
Psychiatry is a field of medicine that attempts at unveiling the mysteries of the human mind in an effort to find answers to the previous questions.
Human knowledge comes to us through the study of acute situations, and it has been the study of those severe diseases that have led us to a better knowledge of the mental structures that rule over all human beings.
We live within thresholds. The boundaries between the healthiest person and the most ill one are very close. We perceive now that we have been referring more to the quantitative than of the qualitative aspects of life. Whe we notice the frailty of the person’ s mental structure as a reality, we are able to perceive that no one is safe, or has an immunity to suffering. This modern concept provoked a change of viewpoint in all sorts of treatments. The word of order is prevention nowadays in all fields of medicine. We have to act with a preventive approach—not curative anymore—mostly in vital areas in our social structure, as for instance, executives, entrepreneurs, and liberal professionals.
This special group is relevant in any society ,and it has behavioral attitudes, which can be different from other members of this society. It should be an object of study in medicine, especially in psychiatry with its psychodynamics and compartmental variables.
Questions
Psychiatry attempts at answering simple questions, such as the following:
- There is a high incidence of heart attack and hypertension among young executives. This is a fact. Why is this incidence so high and its mortality so expressive?
- What can we do to prevent it to happen so brutally and destructively?
- How can we prevent such events? We all know that stress can kill. Technical knowledge of a group, combined to everybody’ s physical and mental health is crucial for the balance of the team, so that it can attain its goals.
- How to keep the group’s balance in a competitive environment?
- Which are the most critical features of leadership?
- How to deal with expansion?
- How can members of a company be emotionally prepared to face its evolutive merging moment?
- What is the importance of these actions to the mental structure of its members?
- How do we proceed to go from one generation to another in family enterprises?
- What kind of impact they have when confronted with non-familiar enterprises?
These questions can only be answered because a group of psychiatrists decided to live, study, and treat this social segment to get to know it better, not only the individual but this person as a member of the whole of the company. Thus, the organization, its net of relationships, and the society in which it is inserted will have healthier conditions and will undergo less traumatic conditions of performance and outcomes.