The psychiatrist: in the mainstream or on the banks of medicine?

The author discusses psychiatry's historical estrangement from general medicine, beginning with its isolation in mental hospitals, aggravated by a deterioration in medical school teaching of clinical psychiatry and by limited psychiatric training programs, and further alienated by much of psychosomatic theory and practice. He sees hope for reconciliation, however, in the recent progress of psychopharmacology and liaison psychiatry within the general hospital.