ABSTRACT
Though the term ‘social psychiatry’ is now widely employed, it remains controversial and poorly defined. In some measure this confusion derives from the word ‘social’, whose uses and misuses Alfred Grotjahn recognized seventy years ago:
Unfortunately, this adjective is at present frequently misapplied, particularly by physicians and representatives of private welfare agencies. Thus, for instance, ‘social’ never means simply useful in our economic sense because many things are economically useful without deserving the attribute ‘social’. Also, the word is not identical to ‘beneficial for the lower socio-economic classes’ because that would apply as well to a soup kitchen or an out-patient department, and no sociologist would consider either to be a social institution….And the ‘social physician’ is a regrettable term which hopefully will never replace the simple welfare physician. In view of such linguistic abuses one should remember that the word ‘social’ derives from the Latin word ‘socius’ and always relates to society, community, or mutual benefit association. 1
