ABSTRACT
This chapter, the book's ‘Epilogue’, starts with an anonymised clinical case history and provides further reflection on key themes discussed throughout earlier chapters, including the further potential and possibilities of psychiatry for the future, focused on preventing mental illness, alleviating suffering, and promoting the rights of people with mental illness and their families. The key message is that psychiatry offers a reasoned and reasonable path forward, once it is approached and practised with knowledge, awareness, humility, and compassion. The greatest challenge that psychiatry currently faces is global injustice in the distribution of preventive measures, treatment options, social support, and protection of rights. These are political matters as well as medical ones, requiring broad-based, interdisciplinary action to address the challenges presented by mental illness across all communities and in all societies around the world.
