A very British kind of social psychiatry

Abstract

Social psychiatry, as represented in the work of Michael Shepherd, his pupils, and his colleagues at the Maudsley, all intellectual progeny of Sir Aubrey Lewis, is a very British kind of science. Lest this arouse your ire, implying an insult hurled at his betters in the mother country by a colonial parvenu, I hasten to add that “very British” refers to the best in your long and admirable scientific tradition in medicine: an unswerving commitment to empiricism, one which rarely moves much beyond its database; sober understatement, which makes no claim of possessing an exclusive path to salvation; sound methodology; and epistemological caution. It is aptly described by the adjective Apollonian, defined in my New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (NSOED) as “serene, rational, self-disciplined”.