Topic

In Context

Placing current practices and ideas within their broader social, cultural, and historical settings.

Making Sense of Clinical Guidelines in Psychiatry

Clinical guidelines shape psychiatric practice, yet often clash with clinical reality. This piece examines what guidelines assume, where they fall short, and why they work best as flexible scaffolds—informing, not replacing, clinical reasoning in complex human care.

Problems With Checklist Diagnosis in Psychiatry: What is Missing?

By emphasizing observable symptoms, DSM-III restored psychiatry’s scientific footing for clinicians, insurers, and researchers. Yet its checklist method sidelined an illness’s course, risk factors, treatment response, and personal experience—“the theory” this discussion explores.