ABSTRACT
In the shifting sands of professional interests, many new ideas and concepts are issued under the banner of "social psychiatry." Despite the conjunction of the traditional opposites, the term has become accepted through usage. It appears in the names of institutes, professorships, learned journals, and numerous books; a few people even identify themselves as "social psychiatrists." The pedigree of the term does not, of course, do justice to the general notion that social factors influence the form or prevalence of illness. That idea is at least as old as Hippocrates' concept of the "epidemic constitution." Quite apart from the national appetite for social and political programs, our review of the vicissitudes of the term "social psychiatry" reveals an inherent and as yet unresolved scientific problem which, concealed behind the scenes, has inhibited the many attempts to define the field and to determine what is to be done within it.
