Although preoccupations surrounding the psychiatric disorders are spreading their roots to Hippocrat and Galen, Psychiatry has defined its statute as a medical specialty as soon as in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of the first antipsychotic medications.

During the ’60s and ‘70s, deinstitutionalization has brought important changes in patients’ life by closing the asylums, reducing massively the number of beds, developing the ambulatory and semi-ambulatory care and drawing the frames for the communitary assistance. During the last decades, new subspecialties have emerged, the diagnosis methods have improved and important progress in therapy has been made. All these facts were the basis in elaborating programs for rehabilitation and reintegration of the patients with severe illness.

This impressive number of progresses would not have been possible without fundamental research in the field of neurosciences or the development of neuropsychopharmacology, that is without the medical model promoted by the biological psychiatry. Despite this evidence and in contrast with reality, the medical model is nowadays disapproved, even looked down upon, as being ”obsolete”, ”abusive” and ”stigmatizing”.

We can responsibly state that contemporary Psychiatry is crossing a crisis period, which is affecting its identity and statute as medical specialty. Paradoxically, our profession is more and more biological in theory (severe psychiatric illnesses have a demonstrated neurobiological etiology) and more and more psychosocial in practice.