ABSTRACT
Diseases of the mind are the least well understood of all medical conditions and are the most stigmatised. Three professions diagnose and treat disease of the mind: psychiatry, clinical psychology and social work. There is another group of therapists, whose training is often separate from these professions; those specially trained in psychoanalysis. Freud and, following him, psychiatry took the reality of mind as a given without much attention to the kind of thing mind was. Today, neuroscience is providing evidence that whatever it is that we call mind, it is intimately connected to the brain. Much of mental illness is explained in terms of the goings on in the unconscious mind especially illnesses such as neurosis, hysteria, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and the like. It is worth noting an emerging research program: Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). It integrates many dimensions: genomics, analysis, self-reporting and so on.
