Hello. I am Stephen Strakowski. I am associate vice president for Regional Mental Health and the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas in Austin.
I want to continue our discussion about rebranding psychiatry. I very much appreciated the thoughtful and fairly lengthy discussion that the previous video elicited. I valued everyone's comments, and I was pleased to see that people were interested and that the video stimulated such a conversation.
Today I want to build on that and talk further about how we can brand our discipline more effectively. In the last video, I proposed a five-step process toward that end. The first step was to recognize that we are responsible for psychiatry's branding problem and for better defining our specialty. The comments many of you made supported the assertion that we own it and agreed with my supposition that we need to do something about it.
I proposed this definition: Psychiatry is a medical specialty that studies and treats disturbances in brain function that predominantly affect behavior—behavioral brain disorders. We frame those treatments within biopsychosocial models and then use our medical expertise to guide diagnosis and treatment. In general, comments about the definition were positive.
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COMMENTARY
How to 'Brand' Psychiatry Today
Stephen M. Strakowski, MD
DisclosuresSeptember 11, 2018
Hello. I am Stephen Strakowski. I am associate vice president for Regional Mental Health and the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas in Austin.
I want to continue our discussion about rebranding psychiatry. I very much appreciated the thoughtful and fairly lengthy discussion that the previous video elicited. I valued everyone's comments, and I was pleased to see that people were interested and that the video stimulated such a conversation.
Today I want to build on that and talk further about how we can brand our discipline more effectively. In the last video, I proposed a five-step process toward that end. The first step was to recognize that we are responsible for psychiatry's branding problem and for better defining our specialty. The comments many of you made supported the assertion that we own it and agreed with my supposition that we need to do something about it.
I proposed this definition: Psychiatry is a medical specialty that studies and treats disturbances in brain function that predominantly affect behavior—behavioral brain disorders. We frame those treatments within biopsychosocial models and then use our medical expertise to guide diagnosis and treatment. In general, comments about the definition were positive.
Medscape Psychiatry © 2018 WebMD, LLC
Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.
Cite this: Stephen M. Strakowski. How to 'Brand' Psychiatry Today - Medscape - Sep 11, 2018.
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Authors and Disclosures
Authors and Disclosures
Author(s)
Stephen M. Strakowski, MD
Associate Vice President, Regional Mental Health; Founding Chair of Psychiatry, Dell Medical School, University of Texas, Austin, Texas
Disclosure: Stephen M. Strakowski, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships:
Serve(d) as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant, or trustee for: Roche; Procter & Gamble; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; Sunovion
Received income in an amount equal to or greater than $250 from: Roche; Procter & Gamble; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; Sunovion; Oxford University Press