Edited by Bibhav Acharya and Anne E. Becker

2024

About half a century ago, psychiatry (and, in due course, other mental health disciplines) took a radical new direction in the hope of transforming our understanding of mental health problems and discovering new cures that could dramatically improve the outcomes of persons living with these problems. Leaders of the field were convinced that we needed to abandon the prevailing approaches, which were characterized by vague and imprecise categories of mental health problems and care models dominated by insight-oriented psychotherapies for common mental health problems or social interventions for severe mental health problems, and embrace the medical model that had served the cause of other health problems so well.