[The new problems in psychiatry (author's transl)].

Modern psychiatry, born of a movement created by Pinel in France and Tuke in England, has set aside the rejection of mental patients, and centred the study of mental diseases in France on the predominance of periodic psychoses, and therefore curability. Another movement, however, arising from the discovery of biological psychiatry has focused psychiatry on schizophrenia and incurability. This is a serious and damaging error. Furthermore, the discovery of toxic causes by Moreau de Tours, and more recently, of experimental catatonia, has enabled psychopharmacology to widen etiological and therapeutic fields. Even so, psychiatry is menaced by a return to the past, perhaps to the point of rejection of mental patients, and this has been accentuated by psychoanalysis, which rejects (psychotics) in favour of neurotics, and by the concept of blocking in incurability. This regression is beginning to affect legislation, with the threat of a return to the arbitrary, and to the social decline of patients, following the recent law on the legally incapacitated.