Dear Colleague,
In the context of its multiple activities, the Portuguese Society of Psychiatry and Mental Health will organize in 2013, between the 31st of October and the 2nd of November, the IX National Congress of Psychiatry.
The central topic of the congress will be Psychopathology, in the year that celebrates the centenary of the publication of “General Psychopathology” by Karl Jasper, the book that we can qualify as seminal and constitutive of the specialty of psychiatry.
Despite advances in neuroscientific knowledge, our diagnoses are still closely linked to the original psychopathological descriptions. Although in recent decades psychiatry has relied heavily on Medicine and Psychology to develop its models for understanding and treating mental pathologies, we are increasingly approaching a limit.
On the one hand, the contribution of psychopharmacological research to greater effectiveness of treatments and to improving the etiopathogenic knowledge of our diseases has been disappointing. In biological psychiatry, the contribution of new imaging methods that are applied in research (not to mention clinical) has been clearly overvalued and has led to new forms of reductionism. On the other hand, the most prevalent Psychology schools in psychotherapy (dynamic, behavioral and cognitive) have a fragmented view of the psychological being and their indications, methods and results reflect this partialization of the human condition.
Finally, the nosological drift of the DSM and the ICD that sought more a diagnostic consensus than a true and genuine validation of the entities that classify, produced and is producing a scientific illusion that has been undermining the credibility of psychiatry in its essence.
The return to psychopathology as a basic discipline and foundation of clinical practice may be one of the ways to overcome the impasse in which we find ourselves, reducing the risk of being incorporated into other fields of knowledge, disciplines and practices. But is descriptive, phenomenological psychopathology the object of study? Your links to philosophy? Your skepticism towards the psychologism and organicism of classical psychopathologists?
There is a whole repository of knowledge and questioning that we cannot put aside and that teach us a fundamental lesson. The validity of the categories and descriptions of the psychiatric clinic, its use in the clinic, goes through the replacement of a new critical and epistemiological view of the production of psychiatric knowledge. They include a return to psychopathology and its support and support for clinical research.
We, therefore, invite you to participate in this scientific event, by your presence or even more actively through any work that you would like to see presented at the Congress.
Maria Luísa Figueira | Pedro Varandas |
Presidente da Comissão Organizadora e da SPPSM | Vice-Presidente Comissão Organizadora |