Renewing psychiatry's contract with society

Abstract

The practice of medicine does not occur in a vacuum. We work within a culture and a society, and we owe it to the society that our services are of a standard that will ensure their use by patients and one in which carers will have confidence in our abilities to look after their loved ones. Society expects certain standards of care and skills from its clinicians and as in any contract we, in turn, expect things from society. However, as such a contract is not specifically written down but is instead a virtual and an implicit one, some factors become crucial in understanding the relationship between society and the psychiatrist. Here, I propose to highlight some of the components of such a contract and how we renew this in the 21st century.