ABSTRACT
The difference between knowledge and wisdom is always worth remembering. This piece was published as "What Is Psychiatric Wisdom?" in the August 1994 Psychiatric Times. It followed up on my debut article there a year before, which had struck a chord in our embattled profession, generating letters from demoralized psychiatrists around the country.
Eight years later it remains unclear whether the kind of psychiatry I speak for here will survive after my cohort of generalists are gone. However, we have learned a lot, and the patients we serve will always be here. I tried to capture the unique aspects of a pragmatic, medical ly based therapeutic discipline whose greatest strengths have been that of longitudinal naturalistic observation and a commitment to the relief of symptoms.
