ABSTRACT
Social psychiatry is concerned fundamentally with the interrelationships between the sociocultural environment and the individual. While recognizing the contribution of heredity, physiology, and psychodynamic factors to the individual's personality and psychopathology, it focuses attention upon the impact of human environment on the individual and the effect of the individual on the environment. Investigators in social psychiatry labor under numerous handicaps. The lack of adequate, comprehensive case-finding techniques and objective diagnostic criteria are most prominent. In addition, investigators encounter problems in assessing attitudes towards the mentally ill. The initial impetus for the developments came from the dramatic successes obtained with the new psychopharmaceuticals and the open door revolution in psychiatry in England. The resulting progress underscored the harmful effects of long-term hospitalization and the beneficial effects of community based and continuous care. Social psychiatry has obvious links with new trends in services, family studies of schizophrenia, and psychopharmacology. It has less obvious relationship to ecological and ethological studies of animal behavior.
