Psychiatry

Abstract

Psychiatry is the medical speciality that deals with mental disorders. In early medieval times, beating, incarceration, and restraint were the “treatments” endured by the majority of the mentally ill, and a more enlightened perspective has evolved only slowly over the intervening 600 years. In the twentieth century, psychiatry struggled to attain scientific respectability by making quantitative observations on mentally ill patients, and subjecting these observations to a variety of statistical methodology ranging from simple descriptive techniques to complex multivariate analyses.