Mental Disorders of the New Millennium

摘要

The most immediately puzzling thing about this book is the title. It has occasionally, for example, been suggested that one of the group of disorders we refer to as schizophrenia is a historically recent phenomenon - that there was an epidemic which started in the late eighteenth century and is now declining, running its course in the way that epidemics do. Most psychiatrists, however, work on the assumption that the disorders that they see have not altered, but rather that changes in the human environment expose different people to different triggers, and open up new ways of expressing the old disorders. There are no "mental disorders of the new millennium" but there are new external factors which may trigger off disorders, new treatments for disorders (not enough, I fear) and new ways in which disorders can express themselves.